


To Sustain the Body

by leslielol



Category: IT (2019), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-11-10
Packaged: 2020-10-19 09:14:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 35,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20654777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leslielol/pseuds/leslielol
Summary: Richie doesn’t make it from the quarry to the Kissing Bridge alone.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I blame one (1) Richie Tozier superfan for this, whose excitement and delight in things is utterly contagious. 
> 
> I'd also like to thank menstruation, doing the lord's work and making me real sad.

It’s Bill who drags him out of the water. The others are there, crowded around him, a breathing, buzzing swarm. They are a battered little company of soldiers, each moving in service of one another. But it’s uniquely Bill who’s drawn Richie’s left arm over his shoulder; it’s Bill’s hand digging into his bruised side; it’s Bill who is whispering to him, breathless, _“It’s okay. You’re okay. It’ll be okay.”_

The sentiments are fractured and small--and fundamentally lies--but none are broken with Bill’s childhood stuttering. 

Richie should be too prideful, should tear himself away and move by his own volition. 

Except, even for refusing to acknowledge the whole of himself for nearly three decades, he knows himself better than that. He knows he’s physically prone to tipping forward, heaving, and expelling what sickens him. It’s become a bad habit in recent years--the projectile vomiting. If he thought any harder on it, he’d see it for a metaphor for his comedy: crude, incoherent, dispersive. 

He doesn’t think, and in this moment can hardly stand, so he’s thankful for Bill holding him up and putting thoughts to his ear. It’s entirely characteristic of Bill’s persistent optimism that some hopeful word might weasel its way in, and take Richie by surprise.

The sun’s out, but there isn’t warmth enough in the sky to warm their bodies. 

Richie’s bundled first into the car, wedged into the back--the middle seat--where he fits least of all. The last touch he gets of Bill is a hand cradling his skull before he’s passed along, handed over like a bright, wet baby rightfully terrified to be alive. 

Bev cups his cheek, and Ben puts a hand on his shoulder. They sandwich him in, and Richie--again, if the horror of the past three days hadn’t attacked his mind like a cleve--might have something to say about breaking them apart. 

_Fuck that,_ he thinks. All the defiance of his thirteen-year-old self grips him and he says, “Are we all comfortable? Ben, you wanna lean your nutsack a little to the left for me, bro?”

But of course he hears himself: pitiful, half-hearted, weak.

There’s too much snot and wet and from his nose, his throat torn raw with screaming. 

All that gets its clear airing is “nutsack.”

“Out,” Mike says. He gets to say so. He’s driving, it’s his car, a tired old hatchback rendered in those Derry colors: rust and piss. 

He makes himself clear even for not saying much else, and Richie is moved from the back seat to the front, where he sits alone, untouched, unseen. 

He slides down in his seat and curls into himself. He thinks if he looks at Mike to thank him for this small reprieve, he’ll come apart. 

“Buckle up,” Mike says, understanding as much. 

The drive feels long. Richie squeezes his eyes shut against the light, hard, until it hurts. 

It’s on the second time they stop--a rolled-to, lingering pause at a corner, for a couple kids on bikes to pass--when Richie startles, scrambles upright, and tries to gain purchase on the door handle, a losing battle for his shaking hands. He realizes they’ve gone too far, that the distance a vehicle affords them means Eddie is well and truly being left behind. They are altogether bracingly free, and Eddie is entombed in sewage and human rot.

It isn't right. It isn't fair. The irony is too heavy handed. The joke ushers in its own awful hush. 

“Guys, please. Please, you guys--guys…” 

His pleas are overwhelmbed by their silence, and Mike drives on.

-

It's only when they arrive at the Derry Town House that Richie supposes it only makes sense that they be here. 

Mike is all steady hands and pristine parallel parking, but Richie still tastes the bitter, dry spread of vomit in his mouth, and something else--it’s clinical and sharp. _Not blood,_ he thinks. _Ear medicine?_

He and Eddie wrestled over a bottle of the stuff, once, some early summer, when Eddie’s mom had him take three months’ worth of ‘preventative care’ prior to an anticipated swimming lesson. She ended up not allowing him to attend the lesson and Richie remembered sitting with a dejected Eddie and the gang--only Bill and Stan at that point--on a bench outside the community pool. He’d unsnapped Eddie’s fanny pack and started dispersing all his assorted vitamins, medications, bandaids onto the ground. Eddie shrieked and gathered them up, but when it came to the useless ear medicine--a disgusting little green-brown bottle with a rubber, tear-drop top--Richie had to make its uselessness--its utter and entire inconsequence--blindingly apparent. 

He downed the remainder of the bottle, declared _Fuck it! Let’s go to the fucking quarry! Bill can swim, he’ll teach you!_ then promptly keeled over and vomited for the next half hour. 

Of course the reaction only served to terrify Eddie, who literally started screaming for a lifeguard, an EMT, poison control. And then there was Richie, on his hands and knees, watery vomit staining his chin and shirt, tears streaming down his face from laughing.

It was one of those quintessential summer days that started warm and only grew hotter by the hour. The sick on his face became hard and tacky, and they did go to the quarry, if only for Richie to cool off. He faked a seizure to draw Eddie close, then tackled him into the clear, shallow waters. The others joined in, circling Eddie and helping his flailing become something halfway near to swimming. 

Richie remembers it was a good day. 

He remembers careening past the then-unrefined Derry Inn on his bike that summer, and every summer. There was never cause to spare it anything more than a cursory glance. He couldn’t even imagine the people who thought to visit Derry. 

Still can’t, if not for these exact circumstances. 

Maybe everyone who summers here is fated to destroy an unholy demon?

Maybe they all seek to do so at their leisure, from the stately accommodations of the rebranded _Town House,_ drawn as it is in heavy hardwoods, burnished gold finishes, and earthy greens. It’s the wrong kind of grand, a thing of status and station Derry never had or will have. Richie suspects Ben hates it for some asinine reason: _the caustic presumption it bears on its landscape,_ that kind of shit.

Even for escaping it in fear of a raving, mullet-wearing lunatic, the Town House isn't how they left it: instead of abandoned, it's littered with police. Most are standing out front, others are crossing through the propped-open doors, having walked the scene and logged evidence. 

It all must be terribly exciting for them: a bloody trail, broken bannisters, an obvious and prolonged struggle. Derry’s ready string of disappearances always hung outside what felt possible, but here was _this,_ here was an awful, wretched scene they didn’t have to schlep down into the sewers to see.

It's Bev who gets them inside. 

She sweet talks the officers, easy as you please. Savvier now than she was even in her youth, Bev forgoes the outright lies--_those glasses make you look like Clark Kent_\--and is sincere enough in her vague truths--_we're guests here, we're from out of town, we lost track of a friend, we think he went back to his room?_\--that they don't ask for further detail. Their eyes follow _her,_ stick to _her,_ and barely skim the four grown men shuffling along in her wake. 

It’s not that Bev is inherently believable or even a good liar; she’s terrible, and Richie knows from bad. The bruises on her arms, the hush stealing through her and strangling her voice after she ignored the buzzing of her cell gave her well away. And now, in a once-white top dyed in blood and shit, she doesn’t have an explanation, only a smile.

And she gives it even without feeling the impulse, and makes herself soft and serene for listening to their questions, nodding, and parrotting them back with all the confidence of an answer. 

Bev champions this role, with Bill by her side. He has the ways and means to craft a story if they need one. Mike--a known entity in Derry--is recognized, and stays, too. 

_Together,_ Richie thinks, seemingly a desperate command, but really: a single and pronounced idea. It's existed as a constant thread in his subconscious, delivered to him the moment he converged with his friends at the restaurant. And it held, even for taking on vastly different tones. 

And it does so again: rather than relief, the term sinks in his stomach, it revels in his intestines, consumes them as if ravished and there is no finer meal.

The idea--now without reason--fails. The thread snaps, the tautness keeping Richie at least upright goes slack, and he stumbles in every way a person can.

There is no Eddie. There is no Stanley. _Together_ was a costly lie sold to seven losers, for which only two paid the ultimate price.

First to leave him is that the inherent grace from an otherwise unforgiving universe that keeps a half-dead body upright. This is only just: the universe has been proven that much broader, deeper, darker than even Richie Tozier’s worst known fears.

He hits the floor _hard_ on his knees. 

Besides his footing, Richie loses his already questionable grip on reality. Blood oaths, clown-presenting demonic beings from space, ritualistic trauma revisited on the same group of thirteen-year-old who, instead of growing from that time, experienced _geography-specific memory loss--_

His psyche is the next to go. 

_\--we can't--fucking--we have to--fucking stay--he's just--**fuck**\--_

Richie is consumed by a new fire, this one burning warmer than the cold fear that had spurred them all to dreaded, necessary action. He is alight with half-formed thoughts, but the synapses snap and break as they’re shot across a blackened, hollowed-out space: his mind, he thinks, but the pain is _so obviously_ nuclear fallout radiating from his heart. The halves of them crisscross, their vibrant tails streaming, cutting, intercepting one another.

He gasps in pain for coming apart, even as a pair of arms arrive to gather him back together.

It’s Ben who somehow gets Richie up, up off the ground, up the stairs. Richie’s sure his soft wailing and limp limbs don’t make it easy. Ben cups Richie’s cheek when they reach the second floor landing to guide him away from dark streaks along the wall, the length of which was marked by a plastic yellow elbow boasting its sequence in an awful dance. 

_12._

By virtue of how purposefully Ben is at steering him away, Richie knows there’s something of great importance streaked across the wallpapered corridor. He fears it’ll disappear before he bears witness. 

He fears he’ll see it, and see nothing else for the rest of his life.

An officer halts them at the top of the stairs. He’s boyish and round-faced, and nothing like what Richie remembers cops to be: perpetually forty and shaped like his step-dad. In the right light, the rookie fits the bill. Richie says nothing as Ben reasons their entry into his own room, leaving the crime scene across the hall untouched. 

Richie groans at the realization that the bloody and broken scenes laid out under foot are not invisible to the untrained eye, as they had been in their youth. Maybe that’s why they weren’t driven to explicit madness; there was enough doubt surrounding the monsters that haunted them, the creature that stalked them, that life could expand in the space between excuses. 

There are no such gaps, now. No lucky spins on the wheel. The damage is deadly; the devil himself has tracked them through time and demanded from them overdue _consequence._

Richie spies the entrance the Eddie’s room, where yellow police tape drags like reused party streamers. 

_Fucking **idiots,**_ Richie thinks, and tries to shout, except--with the heavy arm around his shoulders--his words get muffled in the swell of Ben’s bicep. 

The rest, at least, he manages in a whisper: “He didn’t die here. He fought here. He fucking--”

Ben hushes him.

It isn’t for others to know, not if they can’t appreciate the sacrifice. 

From what Richie gathered at the Library while Eddie inexplicably ran his mouth while applying liquid stitches to his own sagging cheek, Bowers got the jump on him. Richie remembers grinning at him, delighting in Eddie’s manic energy, his ferocity. He outright doubled over when Eddie mimed taking the knife lodged in his own face and plunging it into Henry Bowers’ chest. 

_That’s fucking amazing, dude._

_Thank you! Yes! It fucking was!_

_I put a machete in his skull._

_Oh, shit._

_Then I threw up!_

_Jesus, Rich. You--you killed a man?_

_You stabbed him!_

_My reaction was pure self-defense, man, I have a totally solid case should this go to court. I hope your agent has a good lawyer._

_My agent **is** a good lawyer. That’s how disgustingly wealthy I am._

Richie remembers they both fell quiet, then. With a gentle maneuvering of his tongue, Eddie tested his handiwork along the soft interior of his cheek.

Richie remembers thrusting forward, sticking his tongue towards Eddie’s face. An adolescent move, to be sure, but no less a thing inherent to their relationship, even for being absent all these years. Eddie fought him off while Richie insisted he was only concerned about the structural integrity of Eddie’s _gaping hole._

Silence--as if held overhead by an elaborate rope and pulley system--descended, another hold-over from their youth. It unfurled before them, vast possibility and boundless retreat drawn taut like bedsheets, though neither moved an inch to skew the spread. 

Another moment to pass them by, unassailed. 

Another eternity spent unwittingly reading the other’s mind: _Say something, do something, anything, **please.**_

_Because it can’t be me who ruins this._

In the children’s section of the ruined Derry Public Library, Richie remembers Eddie sat on the green square of the reading circle, a hand pressed against the fresh gauze applied to his wound, and saying, _He still has that fucking mullet._

Fear drummed through Eddie’s words, shaking his resolve for what they’d done.

Richie felt it, too.

He said by way of agreement, _Fucking psychopath._

-

Tears are silently streaking down his face by the time he’s brought to the unmarred bathroom in his room at the Town House. 

This is a new development, though it has the stink of fatality to it. He can’t remember when he last cried; it isn’t a thing his body takes from his conscious, or his faculties give to his heart. But now there’s no spotting it, there isn’t a breath his catches that steadies the next round of bitter regrets from pouring out. 

Richie assumes this is just _him,_ now. A coward who, if he wasn't so cowardly, could have at least saved himself from becoming a failure. 

He’s always suspected as much, to hurt himself simply and continuously with the thought. But it’s a different kind of pain entirely to _know,_ to feel confirmation tear through his body, slice through his heart, and bear down from the very base of his skull, so that his whole figure is forced forward, drawn in, and held tight. It’s only the steady stream of tears that jut outward and find escape. 

He’s bent in such a way that they slide down his nose and fall from the tip. He thinks he’d be parallel with the floor if not for Ben, all broad shoulders, chiseled body, and a scar on his stomach that only ever inched closer to him as he grew up.

It’s hardwired in him to wonder what Ben must think of him in this moment. Self doubt--and its metastasized cousin, approval addition--is an older trauma than even this; it has seniority. 

He gave an interview a week ago--it’s not been published yet, or if it has, Richie didn’t fuck up and hear anything about it, after. He remembers the reporter met him in a hotel room, despite Richie having a place in the city. He’d wanted to make a good impression: a suitcase in an empty hotel room seemed to hold more promise than the place in L.A. he rents, ready-furnished, dripping with art, colored in tastes Richie can’t comprehend the value of, because he hasn’t anything to compare it to. He doesn’t know himself to have _these kinds_ of preferences, the sort that arrive from trusting one’s instincts and delighting in the results. He doesn’t have the words--his own or borrowed--to answer life’s little questions. 

Not that those he gets asked are especially stacked with intrigue. _How did you first do it, getting up on stage? Weren’t you scared?_

_I have minimal self respect,_ he’d say, a seemingly easy smile on his face that took a lifetime to forge.

And, still smiling, _There’s no one in my life I could disappoint. I'm very alone._

He wishes now the interview had gone down in New York, and maybe a week from now, if he’s allowed to play with time as well as space. New York is where he rents what can be generously termed a hovel. He wouldn’t even have to say anything, just stand himself in the narrow space between the twin bed and the toilet, and announce that his formative years--only recently recovered in memory--were dictated by an alien being that sustained itself on exciting and devouring the worst in society, the darkest impulses of humanity, and the misconception that there is never any relief for the tormented.

Richie, understanding the irony now in thinking after answers towards a life no one on earth exists to care about, scrambles away from Ben’s hold. 

There is _nothing_ that can be gained there, no comfort for the weak--only release. 

He twists around in his sodden shirt, fails to get it off, and deposits himself in the shower anyway. He sits like he had in the quarry. His friends may have gathered around and comforted him, but Richie dispersed them just as quickly. He sits in the tub and sobs, feeling inherently unfinished. 

He thinks of Georgie, without his arm.

He thinks of Stan, absent any hope.

_Eddie._

He wishes Stan was alive. Stanley, who always seemed so quietly sad, sad in a way that terrified Richie, because it didn’t seem to hurt him--it was a constant companion, an ache that brought Stan to hold his arms around himself sometimes, but always, _always_ to reach out and offer that embrace to others. 

At the moment, Ben does his best impression. 

He lifts Richie’s legs and retrieves his shoes one at a time, sets them aside with his own pair. He raises Richie’s left arm--the one that’s caught and held up the entire operation--and frees him of his shirts. He waits for Richie to make an attempt at removing his piss, shit, blood, and bile-soaked jeans. Richie gets so far as wriggling them off his hips before giving up.

“I got it,” Ben says. 

_“Youuuu’ve got it,”_ Richie echoes. “Got fucking what, Ben, my limp fucking dick? My--my apparent and debilitating incapacity for processing all this shit? Like, at all?”

“I’ve got you, buddy.”

Ben takes off his own jeans and shirt, and without another word, joins Richie in the tub. They're sat facing one another, and Ben situates himself so that his back is against the faucet. Neither of them fit comfortably, but that isn't the point. 

Ben turns the faucet, lets the water shoot ice-cold down his back until it starts to warm. 

His movements purposefully slow, he reaches for a bar of soap, a tiny bottle of shampoo, a few washcloths, and he lays them out, instruments speaking to intent. 

“I think we should wash your hair,” Ben says. 

Richie stares at his bare feet in the tub. The water is slowly rising, clearer than the quarry’s, and blissfully hot. He doesn’t realize until now that he’s been freezing for days. Maybe longer.

“Don’t wash my hair, dude.”

“It’ll be okay,” Ben says, obviously and quietly speaking to the intimacy inherent in the act, but he’s gentle with the deed, regardless. 

Richie finds he doesn’t have it in him to argue this point, let alone fight its application. He can hardly feel his body except for where it hurts: lungs that feel as though they’ve been seared in fire and drowned in piss; elbows and knees that are mottled with bruises; a hand that was held all too briefly; and worst, a heart that was more of a _Chekhov's gun_ than a _starring role,_ forced to make a surprise appearance, a hero’s welcome in the last act, only to be demolished. 

For a lifetime of denial, his heart was weakened. 

Richie was unprepared for how much it could hurt.

Even the eradication of _It,_ the virus that it was, from his system has left him scarred. Since embedding itself in Richie that summer, It grew, making a home for itself over decades. To be stricken now leaves a great, gaping wound. 

He’s not unique in this. The others suffered much the same, except they learned better. They brought with them the tools to cauterize the wound. 

_It wasn’t your fault._

_You’re not what they say._

_You are loved._

_You’re nobody’s little girl._

_You’re braver than you think._

Richie feels like he’s still caught in the deadlights, and hasn’t landed on a viable conclusion. What about Pennywise’s torment wasn’t true? 

He _is_ what he feared. There _is_ something about him--inherent, not a voice or an act he can put on--that others hate. He is _not_ safe from their torment. It _can_ find him, same as it finds so many others. 

Richie knows he hasn’t answered for himself. If anything, Eddie did it for him. 

Eddie, for being brave, for proving himself capable and valiant, made it so that Richie never had to be honest.

When Ben hushes him, Richie realizes the stinging in his chest isn’t a taste of what Eddie got, but its excavation. His crying has turned audible, punctuated by whining gasps as he loses all agency over his faculties. Even his body is telling him: _You can’t do this. You can’t suffer knowingly and survive. You should have left it all alone._

Ben soaps up two washcloths, and they both pretend for a while that Richie’s going to do anything but let his drip uselessly in his open hand.

Ben washes Richie’s face and throat, works carefully around the ears. When he’s done and Richie’s shoved his glasses back on, his blank stare finally lets a shred of the physical world into view. He chokes for seeing it. 

“You’re so fucking hot,” he says, a joke, but he’s still sobbing.

To his credit, Ben seems less embarrassed to hear as much. There’s no longer three layers of denim to muddy the ruling because, except for his boxer-briefs, he is naked in the tub with Richie. His body is objectively _insane,_ but the posture it takes, the way he’s trying to make himself of use, is what renders him beautiful. 

Richie forces himself to think it is categorically unfair that this is all he was concerned about: biceps and abs spilling out under the shadow of the squarest-fucking-jaw Richie’s ever known to originate from nature, and not the catalogue of a plastic surgeon 's office. 

He knows this isn’t what he’s afraid of, not really. But denigrating himself is at least familiar, and the familiar holds a cold comfort.

“Yeah,” Ben allows, maybe because of the conviction in Richie’s voice, or maybe because he’s too tired to be polite. “But I still felt like an unlovable pile of shit until about two days ago.” 

Ben moves on to his chest and arms, washing in slow, concentric circles. Richie, willing himself out of this state of earth-shattering helplessness, runs his washcloth against his knee. It hits with a slap against the pooling water, and doesn't account for much more than the initial effort.

“Because you and Bev made like the Guillermo del Toro fuck-fish?” 

Ben ducks his head, still the shy romantic he always was. “Because of the way she smiled at me outside the restaurant. Like she’d missed me, really, and hadn’t just… remembered to.” 

Richie sniffles. Isn’t that fucking wholesome. 

But then Ben’s expression tightens. To understand why Bev’s recognition felt so good, he accepts how he was made to believe it was impossible.

“Henry Bowers made me so fucking afraid of myself.” 

Hearing this, Richie stills. He’s mortified that maybe he’s let on, maybe Pennywise took on some terrible vision and they saw the memory for themselves, or--fucking Christ--maybe they remembered.

He’d never breathed a word about it, and Bowers was in juvie by the time school started up again, so there was no direct line of contact. But how many kids were in the arcade that day? How many saw one of Bowers’ favorite insults finally hit its mark? How many clocked the twisting delight on Bowers’ face, matched it with Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier’s uncharacteristic silence, and thought, _No shit?_

In the moment, Richie thinks he hated most that he hadn’t known it himself. This was brand-fucking-new information, a personal revenation--_sure, sure._ But what that _meant_ was he could not claim even a second of forethought on the matter. He never had the chance to think of something shitty and mean to say in return, or--if he didn’t want to get his ass beat--a joke at his own expense. 

He was partial to, _Even if I were a fag, I’d have to be blind to want to bone your cousin. Oh, wait, shit--!_

And at least for taking off his glasses to punctuate the bit, Richie wouldn’t have gotten them broken when Bowers inevitably sucker-punched him in the nose.

Even for not remembering the event since leaving Derry, Richie knew it didn’t go down any way he'd care to imagine. What happened was, Bowers had found the worst possible thing to say, said it, and in that moment, Richie realized it was true.

_By degrees._ He allows the addendum for himself, to salvage a bit of his pride. 

He hadn’t wanted to _bone_ anyone, least of all a guy flopping about in the same shallow gene pool as Henry Bowers.

He’d only wanted the boy to like him, to again compliment his exceptional Mortal Kombat skills, and maybe lean into him a little more. Richie remembers the tantalizing warmth held in the boy’s tanned, bare arm. It was like the sun shone just for him. 

A shaky breath stumbles out of Richie, presenting like a body breaking down a flight of stairs. Ben--kind, good as he is--agrees to believe Richie is cold. He lets the shower run instead of the faucet, and rinses them both off. Ben stands, moving slowly and holding Richie by the shoulders so that they rise together.

"Like looking into a mirror," Richie says. 

He can joke about this, degrade this, because it isn't what he wants by any stretch of the imagination. 

Ben gives a sideways smile, then draws a towel over Richie's shoulders, another for around his waist.

That leaves only a hand towel for himself, which he takes, and razes it over his head and hair, then over his shoulders and chest. He hopes Richie will mimic the effort. It's eerie to see what is fundamentally a human being unable to exert the barest effort towards the motions of humanity: raise one's arms, lift one's own spirit, keep warm, be alive.

He catches himself deciding against it when the thought crosses his mind--but course corrects, choosing purposefully to meet terror with terror in the hope that the twinned tales afford their keepers some kind of relief. 

“That day--the last day or school, the start of the summer… when he and his goons ran me down to the bridge, started… cutting into me…” Ben's fingers skim the crude _H_ carved into his abdomen as he speaks. Discomfort used to cover the particulars of the memory, like snow on a rooftop: you still knew there was a house underneath. 

“It hurt. But I was more scared that… people had seen them chasing me. Teachers at school. Kids. A couple cops stalled in their car, even? And nobody followed. Nobody said or did anything to stop them. I wasn’t worth the trouble.” 

It’s heartless--and a real dick move besides--but Richie likes that Ben is the one shaking, now. 

“And then you and the guys--I don’t think I said two words, I couldn’t catch my breath. But I didn’t even need to ask from you. Eddie and Stan and Bill and Bev... robbed a pharmacy for me. And you,” a smile opens to a huff of laughter. Richie suddenly can’t recognize the sound. ”I mean, first you joked I was gonna die. But then, they were taking so long, and I got upset, you… held my hand.” 

Richie wants to argue that he hadn’t _meant to,_ that he was going to pat Ben’s arm, or slap his tit, and it was Ben who initiated the ultimate form of contact. 

It’s funny, though: for the first time in a long time, the lie doesn’t come so easily for him.

With some difficulty--as if he can’t conceive of how this escaped him once before--Ben concludes, “I think maybe you needed something like that from us. I’m sorry I never…”

“I didn’t ask,” Richie cuts in, hating his lackluster attempt at sounding stalwart while stood--pale and naked and red-faced for all his crying--in front of a veritable Adonis. 

“You shouldn’t have had to.” 

Richie gives a tight shake of his head; he refuses Ben’s contrition. Any man who would strip him of his bloody clothes, bathe him, and afford him such forthright tenderness has not--and will never--have anything to apologize for. 

“I didn’t want it.”

“You needed it, though.” 

They arrive at a standstill: neither is lying and neither is wrong. Both are endlessly sorry.

Ben is dripping wet, but he’s put all the towels on Richie. 

Two minutes into the silence, when Richie hears his breathing for less labored, he shrugs off the towel from around his shoulders and starts to hand it over.

He stalls, bends at his knees and turns his head so that he’s mostly acquainted with Ben’s bare abdominal muscles. He squints. 

“Those are… they’re really in there, huh? That’s just. Wow.”

Ben takes the towel, glad for even a momentary return to levity, though he’s embarrassed for being its source.

“Can you just take all of us, like, one at a time? Bev was just first, right?” Ben flushes pink and mumbles something endlessly practical--_I’ll go get some clothes_\--but Richie’s on a roll. “There’s not a friends and family deal for this? I can keep crying if that’ll do it for you--” 

Ben comes back with their clothes: a t-shirt, jeans, and hoodie he dug out of Richie’s bag. Clean socks and underwear, too, because he’s a gentleman. For his own, Ben again dresses in bolts of denim. 

“You look like a beautiful, idiot farm hand God gave wishes to.” 

Ben flashes him another bemused smile. Richie needs to expel something, and though a litany of one-liners isn’t it, at least he’s trying. 

By the end, Ben has helped Richie undress and bathe and re-dress. The others are downstairs, rifling through the booze left unattended behind the bar and pouring liberally, nevermind the early hour. Ben murmurs something about joining them. 

He says he thinks Richie is up to it. He says he thinks it’ll be good for him. 

Richie wishes he hadn’t asked; now all his jockeying around will be known for the practiced lie that it is. Now he’s exposed as a sneak, whose jokes doubt for quaint lies and each matters less than the sum of their application. 

Richie is a thing, clear film of confidence, and absolutely nothing else. He is residue on a startled corpse, parading around like a man. 

"I can't," Richie whispers. His hair is still damp, but beginning to curl. "I can't. Because in the shitty B-movie version of this, we drink and we memorialize these people we've just lost--our _friends._ And you and Bill and Mike and Bev are fucking better than that, so instead--instead we'll talk about everything else. About our lives away from here and shit. About how everything's gonna change. We'll talk until shit feels normal. And I'll--they'll ask. Or they'll know."

"That's not a bad thing, Rich. It never was." 

Richie feels that impossible tightness overtake his chest again. He grabs at his clean t-shirt, and it’s as though he’s arrived at some new destination--no longer _Eddie,_ but some deserted place after him. A void. 

Richie doesn’t have the language to explain the place’s inherent malfunction. He presses hard, like he means to restart his heart. He knows it’s dead in there, uselessly caged in his chest. It’s not going anywhere. 

His eyes start to sting again. His nose, too. He crumples, and Ben is still there.

_"I fell in love with him all over again.”_

Richie buries his tears and his confession into the well-worn denim of Ben’s button-down. Like old skin that hangs from an aged frame, he stops trying. 

_“In two days, all of it."_

Richie starts to heave and sob, the whole ordeal unfurling within him again, worse now for the reprieve he’d wrongly granted himself. 

_“It felt so good.”_

He sags, like the thing inside him has finally given up. It’s seen all it has wrought on his conscious, on his heart, on the insincerity of one too many smiles. It agrees and is sorry: _this much, you cannot endure._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oop, so there will be a part 3, because I sincerely mean for this to end on a hopeful note!
> 
> In the meantime, misery! 
> 
> Thanks for reading :')

They don’t altogether go slack that morning. They don’t sink into couches, lay tired on the floor, or drink and talk and reminisce in the bar of the Town House. It is, actually, still very much a crime scene. 

Richie and Ben are interrupted by the same rookie officer poking his head in, frowning at the sight of two grown men in a prolonged embrace, two sets of wet clothes on the floor, and a bathtub gurgling as it drains. The last dredges of blood and dirt swirl twice along the wobbly rubber stopper, then disappear. 

The cop tells them they need to gather their belongings and leave. 

Richie thinks this is wildly irresponsible, and babbles on about as much as they're followed out.

“What if we’ve seen something? What if we’re hiding something? You’re just going to escort us out the fucking door? You see all the cars in this lot? You see mine? I, personally, am a flight risk.”

The cop shrugs.

"Sounds like a problem for a U.S. Marshal." 

Although Ben keeps a grip on the back of his shirt, Richie sort of cascades down the stairs, spurned forward by restless anger and indignation. As it happens, the pacing gets him on the Town House’s landing with time enough to address the cop before there’s nowhere else to go but through the array of officers crowding the lobby.

"Yeah, yeah, sounds like. Hey, when you ask, do they remove their balls from down your throat, or do you just power through it?"

Ben tries to continue forward, but Richie has stopped and allowed the cop to pass, and then circle around ahead of them. The man moves at a phenomenally slow pace, like he means to set a nerve-wracking tone for wherever this conversation has any hopes of going. 

He stands in front of Richie and looks him up and down. 

He says, "Are you a fucking faggot?"

Richie spits back, "Are you a fucking detective?" 

The cop starts to reach for his hip; it's a show of force, only, because he means to say worse. His jaw clicks open once, twice, like a roller coaster drawing back before the plunge. 

And Richie wants it. He wants the insults and threats and everything he ever feared was coming to him. It's due, he decides: further punishment for a lifetime of obscurity.

What he doesn't want is what he gets, ultimately: the flicker of recognition in the man's eye, the moment he traverses from anger to delight, because there's nothing genuine to his anger to substantiate it. What at once feels so righteous it should give him ample cause--indeed, reason--to torment others is as fleeting as any wayward emotion.

"Oh, shit, you're that comedian--Richie Tozier, right?" 

And there, easy as anything, is a smile. 

Richie is so, so tired. 

"Yeah," he says. "You want a picture?"

"Sure--!"

"Not with this faggot."

And Richie charges on ahead. He keeps his head down, but doesn't miss the way Ben holds steadfast at his side, ready to engage in this battle like all the rest: to the bitterest of ends. 

Ben and Richie are the last to join the others outside. Bev, Mike, and Bill are standing in the sun. For a moment, Richie sees their faces for those he knew in childhood. He sees Bill’s hardfought resolve, Bev’s depths, Mike’s wariness. He sees two few faces, and his own seizes up just a second before he can think to hide himself, to duck his head, bury it into a mask, and filter his next breaths through any existence less empty than his own. 

Bill gives Ben a look as if to say, _You made it worse? How?_

They start walking, because getting into a car would suggest a greater sense of direction and purpose than any of them had. 

Bev fits herself in on Richie's other side. She takes up his limp arm to drape across her shoulders, then reaches up and laces their fingers together. Being daringly affectionate with him is something Richie remembers she’d do sometimes when they were kids: twisting their legs together when they’re sat across from one another on the school bus, smacking wet kisses to his cheeks, linking their arms as they walked to the clubhouse or arcade, and swooning into one another while intoning romantic lines from movies. He supposes now she’d somehow known or intuited they could mimic love without meaning it, that he was no threat to her heart or body, except when he inevitably tired of their acts of canoodling, and belched in her ear. 

He doesn’t remember if Ben was overly jealous for their displays, like he was when Bev gravitated towards Bill, or if his concerns were mitigated for knowing about Richie, too. 

That makes two.

Richie supposes if anyone knew anything and kept quiet, it was Stanley Uris.

Three.

_Did Eddie--?_

Richie spares a half-formed thought of stepping back and letting Ben and Bev collide, fit like they’ve always meant to: his awe a perfect match for her secret humility. He chooses to talk and tease and deflect, because there’s power yet in denying he’s any more ruined than he’s ever been, that he’s any worse for losing what he never chanced his life on. 

He says in a voice like dry leaves crushed over his tongue, "Should I move, or are you just gonna fuck him through me?" 

He says, "Use me like a condom, Bev." 

She swats his ass. 

Bill wonders aloud if they’ve connected the break-in and damage to the Library, yet, where the dead body of Henry Bowers is splayed out between the fiction and local history sections. 

Mike figures they’d have arrested him already if they’d known. 

“Or, you know. Skipped that step.”

It’s Mike who says it, mostly to save Richie the effort. And maybe he hasn’t remembered as much as he thinks, if he has any doubts in Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier’s capacity to sour a moment.

“Police brutality is no joke, Mike.” 

It’s driven out of him on reflex. Debilitating grief like he’s never known be damned; _shitheel_ is his natural state of existence, the first and the final notes of his life’s pinging song.

They all silently run the numbers: they can’t go back to the Chinese restaurant; the staff would sooner run them out than chance another bout of property damage. Mike’s place and the library are crime scenes, even for not yet being discovered as such. 

They don’t know this place as adults, so they again return to what was safest in their childhoods: the clubhouse.

The walk is familiar, and for crawling half-bent through sewers all night, the chance to stretch their legs is welcome. And either as a result of all they’ve done, or simply the effect of a bright, early morning, Derry feels safer, now. Less deep. They no longer feel as though the earth could open up under their feet, though Richie wishes it would. He begs for every step to collapse him back underground. 

The path through the woods runs narrow, and Richie takes his chance to break away from Bev and Ben. Be brings up the rear and decides he isn’t seen, even for the furtive glances the others throw his way. 

He wipes the occasional tear from his cheek. He doesn’t know if he’s started crying again, or simply hasn’t stopped. 

His stuffs his hands into the pockets of his jeans. He’s not chilly without his jacket, but runs cold for remembering where it’s gone. 

In the quiet solitude afforded them by the clubhouse, they wear Stanley’s showercaps. The resealable tin gets passed around until Richie receives it. Richie, after taking his blue-and-white patterned cap, sees Eddie’s red-pink monstrosity is the last left in the tin. 

He takes it, and the others don’t comment. 

Nothing here is sacrosanct, and this place needn’t be a tomb. 

As far as anyone is concerned, Richie could start scooping dirt from the ground and shoveling it into his pockets. They’d all like to believe they’d understand to impulse. Bill would offer him the tin.

The others begin to talk. Richie listens.

He did this enough, growing up. In this very clubhouse. He'd stare at a magazine or comic book, pretending to read. He'd just sit there, listening to the others, practicing his own brand of disinterested silence.

He hears everything, of course. 

No one mentions the chucklefuck they’ve killed, or how they did it. A miserable, rotten heart held at once by five hands, rendered malnourished by their fortitude, and ultimately crushed at will. 

Maybe no one can bear it, just yet. 

Richie thinks about how angry they ought to be with Mike, but understands he was driven by fear more than most: fear that his friends wouldn’t come through, fear that he’d be left to this place for another maddening 27 years. It spooled out ahead of him and behind, and he was ever-always trapped in its snare. Mike’s been a wounded animal for nearly three decades. He couldn’t bear to struggle anymore, so he cried out for help. 

Ben talks more about his work, spurred on by Bev, who smiles wearily and notes they’re in a Ben Hanscom original. He admits his work is one prolonged effort, a practice rather than an expertise. He is trying to make himself comfortable in a world that cuts corners and denies him full entry. 

Bill admits he’s checked his phone, and in doing so, glanced back at the world beyond Derry. He updates them on happenings from the set of his movie: an intern gave some idea, the director ran with it, everyone’s happy, a wunderkin is born. Bill is glad it’s out of his hands, truth be told. 

He says of the unending horror he’s written out of his mind and onto the page, “It isn’t the story I need to tell anymore.” 

They fall quiet again, each ruminating on how their lives have been shaped by the evil in Derry, and what may now be possible for being freed from its grip. 

Richie listens to the world outside the earth they've dug into. It seems so far away: scattered birdsong, the distant murmur of the quarry, the whisper and drag of tall grass. It makes him think of the very few baseball games he attended here in Derry, but only the start: where the national anthem plays and motions towards reverence are mimed. 

The grass is already on its feet, swaying to what feels like an ancient song. 

The opening to the clubhouse seems to narrow, and Richie feels dizzy for looking up and wrong for questioning it. He hears Eddie’s thirteen-year-old self pacing the area and wailing that the entrance is little more than a coin slot from which oxygen is funnelled in, surely not enough for seven people.

Five, maybe. 

_Think five’ll make it, Eds?_

Richie runs a hand over his face. He almost jumps, feeling the slick plastic of the shower cap drooping over his forehead like unspooled skin. He’d forgotten they were all wearing them. 

He isn’t optimistic about the next decade of his life (if Bev can confirm he gets so long): being undone by every misplaced touch or unwritten rule on the human body was already his schtick, but that was lifted. He hates to think he’s about to become the man from his standup routines.

He takes himself out of his own head and sinks deep into another.

Mike seems different from how Richie remembers: the quiet, thoughtful, reserved boy he knew growing up wasn’t quick to smile or laugh. He kept his joys in the sole of his shoe, and was careful for shifting the weight on his feet, like it was a delicate thing to keep at all, and keep there, besides. His smiles were small, almost categorically private. He always looked around twice before giving one up. 

In the restaurant, Richie remembers Mike all but _bouncing_ for their arrival back in Derry. He stares at the open-faced man, in awe of this change. To have dug out from under his lot of misery, solitude, and doubt, to come out bruised and battered but still standing on the other stand--it’s a veritable feat of will. 

Where Bill felt his tether to reality snap and trail listlessly behind him, Mike operates as if on a rubber band: he's snapped, but there’s no slack. He drags and wants for nothing. 

Mike is freer for being drawn taut for nearly three decades, and all it took was risking something he was never quite sure he had: faith. Faith in people. 

He’s glad for his patience.

Bev, less so. 

She is quiet at the gaping mouth of what is, ostensibly, her turn. 

Richie can’t blame her; it's not on Beverly Marsh to explain to them that men--in any iteration, be they fathers, brothers, lovers, husbands--have sought to take unfairly from her, and done so with great delight. It is not for her to ease their consciences and say this is some specific evil, and not a vastly generic one, and therefore all the more haunting. 

Nor is it for her to proclaim that her friends are excused of these crimes. Yes, the boys she spent that summer with were kind, and it’s not without her input that they went on to be _good._

But she knows Bill's movies, has clocked their hacky imagery of screaming, fearful redheads. Heroines in the end, but tormented along the way, lingering always a moment too long under the camera's gaze. 

She's heard Richie's routines, none so specifically hurtful, but the women passing through them are empty props.

Richie glances up from where he's fixed his gaze on the open earth. He sees Bev decide to speak and to do so purposefully, and it's her conviction more than her words that steal his breath with its power. She means to name her faults, expel their secretive power, and force a kind of pact with those she loves. 

_It happened again._

_I tried to stop it._

_It's a thing like addiction. You kill it every day._

Everyone, Richie thinks, wants to reach for her. No one does. 

They collectively sense she wants only to be heard. She says as much in the defiant jut of her jaw, a gesture that stirs an energy of deadly promise into the air. And because the conversation has, inevitably, devolved into what Richie fears--those deeper explanations of the self--he cannot begin to quantify the simultaneous heights and depths his anxiety takes at the thought of being asked for the same degree of insight. Bev outdoes them all in speaking of leaving her husband, and why it should always feel so difficult to be kind to oneself.

_Subtle,_ Richie thinks, but Bev has his number.

“Subtle, right, Richie?”

He works his jaw, as if making the motions will generate something worth all of their time, some sentiment to make it all make sense. 

He comes up phenomenally short.

“Beep beep, Richie,” he mutters, silencing himself. 

Because this leaves only the dead left unspoken, and Richie--who counts himself an honorary member.

He still will not name it. Even as a kid, even for Pennywise's taunts, the damage arrived coded, a broken and mixed message. Did he fear being forgotten and going unseen, forever? Or was his more pressing nightmare that he might be _talked about_ like they talked about all the missing kids? That Betty Ripsom’s father, accused by his wife of once touching their daughter, came back for her in a move that said, _I’ll do more than that?_ That Patrick Hockstetter offed himself? That Edward Corcoran was probably _happy_ to be gone, hated and tormented like he was for skipping two grades? That Jonathan Chan was missing for days before anyone realized? That Tania McGowan probably skipped town with the first man with a driver’s license she could find to take her away, and was probably still at the nearest truck stop outside of Derry? 

Was Richie not _terrified_ his life could be dictated by others well into death? That of all the awful things rumored about him, some of them were true? 

Or worse, that he’d only ever be seen for the empty lie he presented and upheld? 

Both.

Neither.

Being anything more than a caustic voice shouting from the back of the room. 

Being anything less.

He worries Eddie’s pink showercap in his hands. If he was a religious man--or just a gullible one--he'd put on a voice and swear _the spirit was runnin' through him,_ because he feels what surely must be shades and echoes of the attacks Eddie worked himself into. It's an unmanageable combination: his chest is constricting while his lungs blossom with fire. If he wasn’t still heaving, he’d have started up again.

“You guys wanna hear me cry some more, I’ll fucking cry some more." To add insult to injury, his one stalwart--that singular stronghold of pride--is lost, because his words arrive hacked and torn apart. He's a regular _Stuttering Bill._ "I don’t--this is it. Fuck, man. This is what I got.”

His anguish--never fully recognized or acknowledged, now on arresting display--demands an equally surreal response: the restless, unhinged commentary and intermittent crying ahead of his friends. He vaguely wonders even if the feeling never subsides, will he eventually cease to perform his hurt? Will it not die like so much else he’s found inside himself, only to banish? 

No one says anything until someone says, “We’ll listen.”

It’s terms to a treatise, formally issued but loose with the details. Richie wants to blow it up on the world stage, to cause international chaos, World War III, and nuclear Armageddon all in one fell swoop. 

Listen? To _what?_ His miserable weeping? His pathetic ruminating after what never was and, by his own hand, never would have been? His rambling guilt for all he’s come to despise about himself, the cover he stole from others, and the complete and _fucking total uselessness of it all?_

No. Just--

_Listen._

It’s a voice inside that answers, but not his own. 

Not Pennywise's, either; it's nothing so cruel. 

The voice is understanding. It’s what he wishes he’d ever been told, or figured out, or allowed himself to hope for. He imagines it’s Eddie, telling him off for being a dumbfuck, but climbing into the rigged-up, patchwork hammock alongside him, anyway. Getting close and staying there.

But Richie can't follow Bev and the others with what he _imagines_ he'd believe. He can't bear to talk about himself because he needed a budding teenage psychopath and then a literal cosmic being to _tell him_ what he was afraid of, to spell it out. He hadn’t named it then, and never even _tried_ to fight it. 

He was the weakest.

He joked twice before that it was Stan and Eddie; he tore into that brutal prophecy, acted as though it didn't describe him beat for beat, and heaped its promised ruin over two good men who deserved better. 

With a breath that reaches deep inside and hollows him out, Richie realizes a baser truth: he got his friends killed.

The next breath he sucks in feeds itself to the memories of his friends, and Richie is cannibalized for the effort. The skin is flayed off the roof of his mouth, his tongue is sliced for his omissions, his ego is stripped down to the bone. He devolves again into a weeping heap, his only recourse being theirs--_their_ names, _their_ inherent worth. So he talks about Stan, praising the man's unrelenting sweetness. He's certain that never left him. He says he’s seen Stan’s fearlessness on display at the boy’s abandoned bar mitzvah, where he said _fuck_ in front of a Rabbi and his mother, both. Richie says he wishes they’d all been together to hear it.

He chokes on Eddie's name, and doesn't get it out, but there's no mistaking who he means when he angrily condemns him for being brave and still, being lost.

“He was an overwrought--”

_Am I wheezing?_

“--self-serious--”

_Is this what it is to wheeze?_

“--little bitch.”

_Fuckin’ sucks._

There’s so much he could say--wants to say--about Eddie. All the kind and genuine things he never moved an inch towards, lest he step one toe out of line. It was too great a risk for Richie, who, at thirteen, was still wholly unable to conceptualize the reward.

(His thinking was simple and linear, and therefore all the more powerful: _He'd hate me. If I told him I thought nice things about him, he'd say it was weird and tell everyone and they'd agree, **it's fucking weird,** and he wouldn't be my friend anymore. He'd **hate** me._) 

He falls fast instead into what was always safest--the teasing and joking after every aspect of Eddie’s personality, done with such studied attention, anyone would sooner figure it for annoyance, not adoration.

“Don't do the fucking voice! That's greywater! Have you ever heard of Listeria? Go get my bifocals!"

It's too much for him: the ginned-up authority and feverish certainty that once came to Eddie naturally. Richie can't even replicate its impression without gasping for air enough to sustain the effort. 

He comes crashing down, and stands in his own ruin, shuddering and reduced to a whimper.

"If I really loved him, why couldn’t I save him?" 

It isn't actually rhetorical, so Richie asks again: “If I loved him now like I loved him then--and, fuck, I fucking do--why didn’t it turn out the same? Why didn’t he make it? What did I do wrong?” He doesn't think fast enough to mask his jealousy of Ben and Bev, so he wounds them when he says: “Why couldn’t I save him like you saved each other?” 

It's ugly: his tear-mottled face, his pain, his desperation, all of it. Even if he had something to compare it to, he'd guess this is the worst he's ever been. 

But it must feel worse than it looks, because his friends don't flock to him like they had in the quarry's muddy waters. No one runs him a bath. Ben doesn't again embrace him with his abdominal muscles. They only do as promised: they listen. 

It gives Richie a taste of the false confidence that sustains him on stage, where, even for being in the midst of thousands of expectant people, he counts himself removed. Their lives and opinions and thoughts don’t matter; what matters is Richie’s ability to excuse all that from his personal equation and speak to something baser.

They stare, an expectant audience. He'd know. 

He wipes his face and steals another breath. He swallows this one, as if that should keep it any longer in his system. 

If there's anything he can say for himself, Richie forges it with equal parts truth and lie: “I mean, life as a joyless cliche was working out pretty well for me. It was coming back here that got everything fucked up.”

In terms of both understatement and overstatement, Richie likes that it plays in both arenas. 

Like Michael Jordan, if he hadn't been colossally shitty at baseball. 

That's me, he thinks. _The Michael Jordan of baseball._

“Not one of us got away,” Bill says. It’s both an insistence and a denial: Richie wasn’t doing well, none of them were. None of them ever would be well with this _thing_ haunting them.

“From any of it. Even for leaving, or forgetting, or understanding. Mike’s lived here all his life and--” Bill stops, like he doesn’t want to state the obvious, even for making an example of their friend: they’ve been in Derry for three days, and Mike’s life seems to have been led to arrive solely at this moment. There is nothing else--_no one else._

Bill addresses Mike plainly, a little sadly.

“You’re still the outcast. In your own hometown.”

And maybe they really have appeased some great cosmic disbalance, because Bill's stutter has once again abandoned its host.

Bill continues, focused, as if the narrative is presenting itself to him and becoming whole as he speaks it aloud.

“The shit that followed… became a pattern. The mistakes. The self-blame. The doubt. The disregard of our own autonomy. The denial.” 

Bill’s face reddens as it should: he always sought to articulate crimes or misgivings, even when the words escaped him. He always dug his thumbnail and scraped away at that first shade of justice worn by acknowledgement. 

"We knew it all, once. Forgetting was always a ploy meant to bring us back." 

Blanketed in generalities and laced with forgiveness, it’s a nice thought.

Richie Tozier doesn't deserve nice.

"That sounds fucking great, Bill. Fucking sign me the fuck up." 

The clubhouse doesn’t lend itself to feeling oceans away from one another; they’re all bodies maybe a body’s length away. Still, Richie feels inclined to scream to be heard from the distant coast of another’s skin. 

“You think I didn’t know I was a giant gay coward this _whole time?”_

He'd known, he thinks, in much the way anyone _knows,_ aware enough from a young age that sexuality feels both unprompted and yet untenable. He’d tried to chalk up all the associated distress and self-loathing as your run-of-the-mill internalized homophobia, but felt something else, too. Some niggling idea that this was his own unholy folly, for which all corresponding anguish was not unfounded. He’d known he had some visceral truth no one else did. 

What he couldn’t _remember_ was his distinct humiliation, the exact cruelty that went in to styming his budding affections at their blind and blissful start. He couldn’t remember the exact words Henry Bowers used, the silence that fell in the arcade, the faces that turned to clock his and mark him for life. That seems fair in hindsight, given that he subsequently did not remember the tauntings of an _otherwordly murder clown_ and the death that surrounded them lending credence to its threats genuine. 

But he _knew,_ starkly though without context, that he could not close his eyes and tell himself _it’s not real, it’s not real._

His desire for affection, for love, for understanding--and not even the promise of delivery, just the potential to be seen by others as deserving--was real. It was the very awakening of his humanity, the axial tilt from human to _being._

And at its core, making it real rather than theoretically--though no less unattainable--was the absolute certainty he held that the person he wanted those things from, and could give to in return, was Eddie Kaspbrak. 

And from that summer came the emergence of his unfathomable brokenheartedness, delivered piecemeal by a mournful ache every day upon awakening to realize everything he’d ever wanted was impossible. And by extension--all that he was, was incongruous with reality. A waste. 

It bore into him as a boy, ducking behind those moments caught in the summer sun with his friends, where an afternoon drags for a lifetime, and he was spared from thinking of the empty, soulless spell of time and space stretching out before him. Its ruin spilled out in adulthood, reaping all the reward until he was this: a tired, loveless, middle-aged man. 

That’s Richie’s difference: he never questioned his fear; he believed it. He looked at the world around him: the best insults to throw in someone’s face, the things written in perpetuity on park benches and school lockers and the sides of buildings, the way certain assaults or murders passed as a mere blip on the local news wordlessly defined its victims as deserving. 

For this education, Richie was prudent and wise and heeded its warning. And for his trouble, he was never denied, hurt, killed, or otherwise fed back his own heart in wet, thin strips. 

For his tact, Richie’s spoils carry themselves still: he is denied the same release the others got. For all the murder and destruction he is nevertheless party to, all the terror and the loss, no terrible weight is lifted from his shoulders by this, their tidy end. 

To his immense horror, the others are still listening, which means Richie is still _talking,_ bearing himself in ways he never intended and can scarcely fathom, even for doing it. 

Bev shakes her head. Just the once, and it’s final. 

She tells him kindly, firmly, that Pennywise did not give them anything. 

“We took it for ourselves,” she says. 

Sadness rests like a loose eyelash at the very height of her cheek. Richie wants to cry again for seeing it, and making her wear it, but he realizes a moment too late it is not her sadness borne out, but his reflecting back at him.

Bev says, “I think… when you stood with us, you did that on Eddie’s behalf, with his say-so. You took what he needed: fearlessness.” 

She is utterly sincere. It’s the kind of thing one might not normally say in front of others, except that there's nothing that can go unsaid after what they've all faced together. Theirs is a union, a time-warping cabal, getting smaller all the time. 

“Doing that was… a lot of what you wanted. Everything you wanted, even.” Bev’s face constricts. Richie supposes this is something like beauty demanding replication, except he knows they all look like collective shit, with him being the worst offender. 

Her eyes are shining, flinty pieces of steel. She looks impenetrable.

She says, “Standing for him was an expression of love, Richie.”

It was too perfect a sentiment: exactly what he needed, and impossible to disprove. Richie thinks he must have made it up himself and whispered to Bev earlier, begging, _Please. Give me this._

“Yeah, I don’t… okay. Sure. Whatever.” 

He doesn’t like the way his voice sounds like the warbling of a tin roof after a summer rainstorm, when the sun comes out to burnish and warm it too-fast. 

Richie looks up through the clubhouse’s opening, stares hard into a day that is still only dawning. He thinks by now it should be dim. Blue light should be coasting over the trees, blanketing the last dregs of red and orange, blurring purple before blackest night falls. There should be cricket song rising up from the earth, and when that and the sky meet, a boy is officially late getting home. His mother is beginning to worry.

The streets should go quiet and the river should be _screaming_ in comparison, roiling and black, its shallow waters suddenly holding between its banks all the depths of the oceans.

This should all finally be over.

-

Mike suggests breakfast--a place nearby with a damn good scramble--and it is silently agreed upon. 

The diner is bright, the tabletops a pearly white and the floor checkered in a fifties aesthetic that suits a town perpetually living in its past, despite never giving it a real discerning look. 

They order heaps of food, plates and platters more than they can eat, but enough to sustain one another's company. All they know now are insurmountable feats, and here’s another: to play like people until the coffee and eggs and sausages and hash browns get cold. 

Mike is two bites of scrambled eggs in when he gets a phone call. He stands on ceremony and partway excuses himself, but privacy is an illusion after what they've been through. They all grasp who it is seeking him out, and why. 

The police have discovered the body of Henry Bowers at the Derry Public Library. Mike, being its keeper and sole patron most days, is asked to “come on by for a quick word.” 

Richie feels like “quick” and “word” are the names of a couple slugs, but Mike carries himself with a kind of local certainty none of them can argue with. He leaves with a piece of toast and a promise to meet them back here. 

Necessity trumps hedged bets, and the others once again set upon their meal. Anything should look appealing to anyone who has spent the last twelve hours in a sewer, but this especially: scrambled eggs the consistency of clouds, golden biscuits the size of a man's fist, an entire grapefruit, scalped and glistening with sugar. 

It looks fake, Richie thinks. Or rather: Not real.

He's come to know a very real distinction between the two. 

"Richie, honey," is all Bev has to say. She presses a glass of orange juice into Richie’s hand and he accepts. 

He takes a sip.

His body recognizes the taste and texture, responds to the much-needed calories, potassium, and vitamin C. He drains half the glass. He sits back, momentarily sated. He feels more aware of his body than he has in the past three days--longer, even. Top shelf bourbon doesn’t do to him what this no-name-brand juice concentrate in a smudged glass does.

Richie sits straight up, then bends forward, twists right, and proceeds to regurgitate the juice back into the glass.

Most of it makes a clean--if decidedly glum--return. The rest sloshes over his hand and onto the floor, warm-wet and spoiled. 

The table goes quiet. 

Richie wipes his mouth.

“Yum.”

He mutters something about the bathroom and the tip, caps it with the start of an apology, but loses his train of thought.

In the diner's mens room, he realizes his face is red from crying. Initially, he doesn't understand the relationship between a steady stream of tears and a ruddiness that has seemingly changed the very texture of his skin. His eyes are too-bright in comparison, and the effect is disorienting. 

He removes his glasses and the effect is somehow worse. They take up the bulk of real estate on his face, which leaves him looking increasingly bereft without them. 

He glances along the urinals, the two twin stalls. They're empty, and Richie doesn't know anymore if he's fearful of Pennywise still, or hopeful he might get a second chance to beat the fucker into submission. Maybe tear off another couple of legs. 

He feels nothing for either notion: no fear, no vigor. He is emotionally bereft, and it is a grim and familiar existence. His failures are at once greater than the destruction of a cosmic entity, and smaller than the bathroom stall he slides into when the need to vomit strikes again. 

He spills stomach bile and sewer water. 

_Greywater._

The correction reverberates through him, a breathy whisper given too-close to his ear. 

He rakes his fingers over his tongue, digs them down his throat--his jaw aches for it, but there's more yet to come, he's certain. No one lets the first boy they ever loved die, then abandon his body to the scariest place that boy had known, cry and be a little sick, and then gets to call it square. 

Richie wants to reach far into his own throat and tear out something of worth: his voice, maybe. His heart, if there's anything left to get a grip on. Nothing like the macabre he deserves comes to pass. Instead, he gags and spits up a little more over his hand. It smells heady like flesh, but it's a slick film, nothing of substance--_really on brand for me,_ Richie thinks. 

He shuffles out of the stall and rinses out his mouth at the sinks. He doesn't look at himself this time; there's even less to see, now, and Richie knows that well enough without taking an inventory. 

He hunches over the sink, arms folded inward, shoulders now too-broad for him ever to look small again, though he feels it thoroughly.

Richie remembers now with blistering clarity the back half of his conversation with Eddie in the Library, of being sat on that ugly carpet, Eddie picking at his bandages, Richie trying to steady his shaking hands and empty stomach. He remembers how Eddie didn't fit in the child-sized chairs, but Richie said otherwise: _You finally grew into them, Eds._

And Eddie didn’t respond. He watched the others, watched Mike confer with Ben and Bev, who were more resolute in their path now than ever before. Eddie looked at Richie, then, and realized the two of them were stuck. 

Richie remembers he said, _I can't believe you did that for Mike._

And he thinks now he knew then--instantaneously--that it was not a question, not a challenge, not even a thing _for Richie_ despite being said _to Richie._

It was a purposeful act of exclusion. Eddie saw the deed itself and what it took to do it, and placed himself so, so very far away. Such was always his station: outside the realm of possibility, looking inwards, seeing all his friends, and wishing he could mount the same resolve as them. 

Richie’s reply surprises him even now--that, in a moment lost to his own private horror, he was afforded more good sense than not, and for the first time in the longest time, he’d been caught off guard enough to bear himself plainly. He’d fixed on Eddie--not turned to him, because Richie was that already, always, maybe forever--and he stared and stared until Eddie himself could not find an inch around him through which to not be seen. 

Richie said, _I'd do anything for you._ and _All of you._ and _Because you'd do the exact-fucking-same-fucking thing, Eddie. Don't count yourself out._

And Eddie had looked at him like he’d been given a great mercy: the gift of another’s confidence. He didn’t even have to prove himself for it; Richie spoke as if he _knew,_ as if one or two wild instances in their youth predicated a lifelong heroic turn, as if Eddie could sustain everything he was--asthmatic, ruinous, fatalistic, neurotic--and everything his friends believed he could be--a hero--and exist in untroubled perpetuity. 

As if there was, as Richie had always insisted, nothing inherently wrong with him. 

He’d need reminding of it once again before their time was through, but Richie is more enchanted by the _Thanks, Richie_ he got from the reading circle than the one delivered in the dark channels of Derry’s underbelly. 

In the library, Eddie wasn’t wet, terrified, and desperate to be told what he already knew was so. _We have to do this. We swore an oath. It has to end._

In the library, Eddie took the compliment more shyly. At the time, Richie fully intended to ruin the moment, to sideswipe his friend with some distasteful line or another, anything to make his brow furrow before his face set into the stoney abruptness of his usual annoyance. Doing this would return them to proper form, and they’d bicker and sneer and grab at each other with words enough to steal any deeper passion from their tongues. 

But adulthood had taught Richie to hesitate, to consider that other people did not live as absently from their emotions as he did, to watch for those movements, and to learn. 

He saw a smile tug at only one end of Eddie’s lips, twitch twice, then smother itself. He watched as Eddie frantically searched his pockets for his inhaler, pawed at its outline, gripped it, and decided otherwise. And then, Richie remembers, they sat in silence for another two minutes before Mike was well enough on his feet and Bev and Ben had figured out where Bill had gone off to. They lied to themselves, deciding the time was spent collecting themselves from the violence and necessity of their respective deeds. 

All Richie really remembers from his time in the reading circle was watching Eddie try not to watch him, and thinking, _Look. Look at me. Look at me. Fucking look at me when I’m looking at you. Look. Look. Please, look._

The memory alone feels like a second chance. And Richie knows--_he knows_\--he still would not have told Eddie otherwise. Or said more than he did, despite wanting nothing more than to tear open his heart for Eddie Kaspbrak, and not have him balk for its contents. 

It’s a rigged game, love. 

And Richie’s a _Loser,_ after all.

They spoke more in the car--Richie’s, all red and slick, the kind that made great toys but never looked natural anywhere else outside of a fat little hand running it in circles on kitchen floors--but Richie can’t be sure, anymore, if he has absolute recall on the moment, or if he just wishes there was more to cling to.

Eddie said, _This is a hideous fucking car. Why is my seatbelt so low. Are there even airbags?_ and then, when the path to Neibolt in Richie’s car felt as familiar as when they last made the journey on their schwinn bicycles, _I only came back because I was terrified I’d be the only one who didn’t._

And Richie had answered him, _That’s as good a reason as any, man. I came back to see if you’d grown past your larva stage._ He’d added, lips pursed into a smile, _Results are inconclusive._

_Fuck you man, I’m at the gym, like, three times a week. I do pilates. I am in peak physical condition. You look like you’ve been dead for nine hours._

Richie _does_ remember laughing, which isn’t a thing he’d imagine for himself, so it must be true enough. He thinks he must have thrown his head back to do it, because Eddie grabbed the wheel and shrieked about how he wasn’t going to die going fifty down a residential street. 

_No,_ Richie thinks now. _You didn’t._

There's a gentle knock at the door. Richie can't place it right away--the sound is too soft, the intention misplaced--but it comes again, and of course it’s Bill, seeking him out. 

“Rich?”

It’s as if each can only handle so much sadness and ruin divulging itself from a six-foot scarecrow frame of a man they’ve only ever known for dick jokes and a seeming lack of depth that must have been comforting to people with terrible secrets of their own.

Or they’ve drawn straws. 

"Richie, can you come out? Mike's back."

He feels sick all over again.

They’re going to talk about Eddie.

In all the ways they’re not currently talking about him, Mike’s going to have something to say for his absence, because he’d gone away from their miserable little party, traipsed through the outside world, and returned having pocketed its truths. There are realities to contend with, even in a town like theirs. A man is dead, and it doesn’t matter that some greater evil was defeated; it’s nothing they can name. There are no floorboards to tear up and show the stash of ruined lives, not unless one were to excavate the whole of Derry, Maine.

Part of Richie can’t believe they’re haven’t been hauled into a cell by uniformed officers already, for destruction of property and sustained harassment of a child _at the very least._

It should be a five alarm scandal: local boy-turned-murderer-of-his-police-officer-father escapes, returns to his hometown, torments visiting denizens, stabs some, current whereabouts unknown. Maybe it’s the systemic suppression of all ill-tidings--the same mayoral decrees that allow Derry to hold festivals, baseball tournaments, and Summer Salsa Nights while children go missing, while body parts bobble in the river, while murderers run loose. 

The best they can do, it seems, is a smattering of procedure, slathered over the scene after the fact. 

Mike is sat back at the table, a cup of coffee in hand.

He takes a sip before he tells them what the police have decided. 

And Richie appreciates the word, because coming to conclusions in Derry isn't about finding the truth, it's about finding what's palatable.

"After Bowers killed a guard in his escape from the Juniper Hill Asylum, he went back to what was familiar. He recognized and stabbed Eddie, was fought off, killed a child at the festival, perhaps was involved in the disappearance of another. He found Eddie again in the Library, but was killed in self defense." 

"Whose?" Richie asks dully, because the story lacks excitement when the truth is so much more bizarre. "Yours? I killed him." 

It's not so arresting a thought; Richie is more distressed over all he _didn't do_ these part twenty-four hours.

Mike has a look in his eye Richie doesn't recognize. It's cold and sure, like a steel ball floating neat in a glass of scotch, the kind of thing Richie thinks would sooner break teeth than sweeten the drink for the risk. It is a sign of something developed later in life, a defense mechanism for surviving Derry. 

"When they dust the machete for prints," Mike says, "They'll only find Bowers'." 

Richie looks to Ben and Bev, and finds their stares averted; they're fully aware of whatever intervention Mike led, and its purpose. Richie realizes whatever happened, happened when he and Eddie were sat dazed in the children's section. He remembers now it was _Mike_ who sent him there, and Eddie after that. 

_It's okay. I'll take care of it._

Richie recalls his faint reply: _Okay. Thanks. Don't step in my vomit._

Bill, when he clocks the expressions around the table, and puts Mike's certainty together with Richie's unease, looks like he wants to steal it for his next book.

"When they think it through, it'll stick. Bowers raised the machete back above his head and…" 

The gesture Mike makes echoes nothing of Richie's deed; it isn’t a machete splitting a man’s skull at the brainstem. It is mere happenstance, irony, and dumb luck rolled into one. 

Mike continues, his voice low but not as surreptitious as Richie decides he needs, "They'll say Eddie, whose blood is in the library, too, succumbed to his injuries." 

The others bow their heads slightly; this is their tale made acceptable to the world. This is what they can walk out of Derry and live with.

Richie, who just yesterday was taunted with visions of death from Pennywise and _assured of it_ by Bev, feels stranded among them. They have faculties enough to make those journeys, and for his own, Richie is a grotesque, taxidermied figure in that his death is a death in practice. It is merely delayed. 

It’s been alluded to, spoken of, and wanted; why won’t it finish? 

Thinking wildly maybe there’s time yet to be looped into a set of consequences that will see him through to that end, Richie raises his voice when he says, "Mike, I'm sorry, but that is so fucking stupid. Eddie's not a fucking cat in a street brawl, here. He didn't crawl away someplace to die." 

Richie swallows, and loses his resolve just as fast.

"We took him there." 

The wetness returns to his voice.

Richie's drowning again.

_"We left him there."_

Richie realizes that, while he could march up to the next uniformed officer he sees and gamely admit his part in Henry Bowers’ demise, he doesn’t have it in him to answer for Eddie. Even he isn’t crazy enough to think the truth will get him anything like peace. 

Bev is flush against him, her arm around his shoulders, drawing him in. Only under her embrace does he realize he’s shaking. 

“You’re in shock,” she tells him.

“Oh." He hates how he sounds: not angry, just tired. “Shit. Is that all?”

They're quiet. And quieter still when Mike tells them they can go back to the Town House. 

“And, well… home.”

-

_I don’t want to go home._

Richie doesn't outright say this, but the sentiment is understood. His bag is already packed, thrown blindly into the backseat of his flashy rental car. As he was very nearly, so could he be again: the first one gone. 

He watches the others go, instead. Each does the same awkward dance: they start to leave, they hesitate, they glance over a shoulder to where their life is situated and set to begin anew. They look to Richie, as if for permission. 

_One-two-three-one-two-three._

Richie tells them--honestly, even--“I just need to be near him a little longer.” 

He gets as far as Neibolt, and no closer. 

He sits in the dead grass amid the splintered remains of surrounding trees and fence. Each steel post was ripped from the crumbling earth and hurled like javelins as everything came down around the Well House.

If he looks dead ahead, Richie sees blue, blue skies. It’s a testament to how far the place has sunk that there’s a view overtop of this awful, looming place, or else Richie isn’t in the mood to read into the metaphor: _it’s all clear skies from here on out, friend!_

On the ground under his feet, he sees dust-colored grey months. Hundreds, thousands of them--all dead. He imagines they blew out of the collapsing house like a sneeze, imagines it was quite the sight to see. 

He wonders what kind of evil this was, really, if nature itself couldn’t know to steer clear. 

He wonders how their world can be so vulnerable that it should hinge on only a few miserable forty-year-olds to tip the scales away from unparalleled, unholy chaos. 

He wonders about securing the lead.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay. Okay. I'm still really, really fucking serious about giving this a hopeful end. I felt the movie hit that note for Richie, and I want to get there along with it. 
> 
> I just wanted MOOOOORRREEEEEE SAAAAADNESSSSSSS.
> 
> So, here's that.

Richie Tozier forces himself up, off the ground ahead of what was once the house on Neibolt Street. He thrusts into that new space--dizzying and sickening still, but the air is sharper here, clearer for keeping his head up. Six feet ramrod-straight in the air is as much a world of difference to him now as it was at thirteen. 

He refuses--at least in this moment--to dwell in those same depths as gag-worthy sewers. 

He acts before he thinks about what it is he is really doing. The first instance is wildly satisfying. The next ten are more of the same. A dull burn creeps into his arm and spreads to his back, but he continues. 

He doesn't stop when he cuts himself on a shard of glass, but soon after, when the blood proves so slick and warm as to provide him phantom comfort.

He looks at his hand with the vague hope that someone is holding it.

No one is. No one _could._ He's alone, having been heaving up broken wooden beams, wall insulation, and glass window panes, all in some vain attempt at finding a way _in._ There’s a world under the remains of this sunken-in house, and one man lost somewhere in its sunken depths, somewhere he shouldn't be.

_I can still help him._

It’s not a working thought, now, just the memory cycling through. He’s genuinely shocked how ardently he'd believed it yesterday--not _just_ that Eddie could be helped, but that Richie could be the one to do it.

That his love needn’t be forever unapplied or silent. 

Pressing a $1,000 jacket he stole from the Today Show’s wardrobe department to a gaping hole it could just as well _fit through_ doesn’t seem like the height of assistance, in hindsight.

Richie feels his stomach twist, tastes bile at the back of his throat, smells blood and waste as if a toxic plume has erupted directly under his nose. He gags and covers his mouth, painting his lips and chin in a smear of glossy red. 

He remembers how Eddie clawed at his hand and spread his own over it--not so tenderly, but to throw a wider net over the gaping wound in his stomach. He remembers how their attempts to staunch the bleeding only resulted in the slip of their hands, uneasy like a child at a waterpark, teasing a gruesome plunge. 

They fell into him, some. A little. Once or twice. Fingertips at first, in that wild underestimation of damage. He went down to the knuckle once, by accident. Richie couldn't help these impossible transgressions; in the real world, bodies weren't borderless. 

He wonders if Eddie was as deliberately aware of that fact in the moment--as he would have been, if roles were reversed and he was tending to another's mortal wound--or if the shock of such trauma took him out of himself. If--_finally_\--his mental slate was wiped clean, the scoreboard powered down. No risk, no reward. 

Richie decides it did, though not by satisfactory means of elevating him away from corporeal pain and anguish. 

No, Eddie only drifted out of himself enough to crack one of Richie's jokes.

He remembers how, upon realizing he was doing a shitter job than he would have at thirteen, back when Eddie himself was already a steady hand, Richie started in: _I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Shit. I'm so sorry._

And, _Do I--Eddie, Eds--do I apply pressure? Be--below the heart, I guess? This… general… area? Eddie?_

And, _Paging Dr. K?_

And again, _I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry._

He remembers Eddie got a second wind--or else, Richie forced another bout out of him with his fretting--and managed to speak amidst Richie's stream of consciousness: _It’s not your fucking fault, dickwad._

He leveled the verdict in a voice so calm and steady, Richie would have sworn it wasn’t really him. Sworn and believed it, testified in court to its veracity, burnt it into his flesh and tattooed it on after. 

It couldn't have been Eddie.

Except the others were busy bullying a cosmic clown to death.

Except no one else could craft the term _dickwad_ into an honorific. 

Except Richie would never allow himself absolution.

And the cadence was there, Eddie’s unique way of speaking that heightens while simultaneously digging in ahead of its target. He spoke like a confronted prey animal: shrill and loud despite his stature, miming threatening moves with a non-threatening presence. Eddie could get away from himself in one of his panics, but there was no mistaking his fury as a wispy, baseless thing; he'd bare his teeth and make you believe in the promise of his bite. 

At the time, Richie accepted Eddie meant what he said. His displays of bravery did not begin and end with spearing Pennywise and drawing Richie out of the deadlights' grip. There was also this, a radical act of kindness. 

He can accept what and why it was done; deservedness remains a great, cavernous gorge he won't ever attempt to fill. 

Can't, because too much is drawn from him by example. Can't, because these experiences don't build so much as hollow him out. 

Richie now knows what warm flesh feels like, how it hums and quakes against its own machinations. He knows how dense a man’s body feels after the heart stops working to keep it alive: the head feels terrifyingly heavy, the body too loose to hold it up. It might roll right off its marker if someone isn’t there to cradle it gently, to press a kiss to the dark hair swirling from its crown. 

Richie remembers the taste of hair and sweat in his mouth, and comes to the only conclusion: it was the first kiss he'd ever wanted, and the last he'd ever get.

At Neibolt--practically on top of it, now--Richie tears into another mound of debris. There's a profound evil here to unearth, just below the surface. He feels it rise up through sediment, hears it set ground water to boil, bears it like a hot iron held against the soles of his feet.

He screams. 

It's a knotted, looping swell of _fuck, fuck. **FUCK.**_

He's reminded of Ben, who shocked them all for his righteous anger and primal scream at the cusp of the rock war. And were it not for his nerves and that omnipresent dread that he might be asked to explain his token to the others--and ultimately outing himself all the same when he got uncharacteristically tight-lipped when Eddie found the display incredulously empty--Richie thinks now he meant to feel relief when Mike produced his token: the first rock thrown in that defining fight, lobbed in his defense by people who were his friends without hesitation. Richie thinks now, if he allowed himself to feel, he'd have been glad that moment enshrined itself, just as he should be glad to call to it now, and harmonize with twenty-seven years of muffled fury.

This is all in hindsight. Wasted, worthless hindsight. 

Because in that moment, stood huddled in ritual, Richie was stolen away with a different train of thought: Eddie didn't know. He'd never known. Somehow, he'd never gotten wind of the fact that an older boy had called Richie a faggot, and he'd run out of the arcade to a park bench, crying because it was true.

He exhausts himself and falls backwards on his ass to marvel at the simple, grim fact that, for all his rage, he hasn’t done anything to the ruined house. He can’t.

For every plank he's lifted and thrown aside, there is another, and more still after that. And Eddie is an eternity below them, entombed. 

He stares out ahead of him, past his aching legs and dusty shoes. He sees the earth again and scattered atop it, the moths. They've become brilliant shades of orange and red, mirroring the setting sun. Light touches them like the lick of an open flame, and Richie thinks feverishly about setting the whole thing on fire. 

It might work, he thinks, and suddenly from his desperation, a plan is born: Burn through the house. Uncover that awful well. Find a way inside the stone sewer, cavernous rock, and cored-out earth underneath. Go back to where It all began. 

Find Eddie. 

And if he can't make it out a second time without four pairs of hands alternatively bearing him and dragging him onward, then nothing he wasn't ready to lose 24 hours ago will be missed.

His stomach lurches and his fingertips go numb, telltale signs from his personal biology that he thinks this is certainly an _idea,_ though by no means a good one. 

But Bev isn't here, so he doesn't have a light. Nevermind that intellectually he knows better, knows the entire pit collapsed in on them, that the sheer force produced a cloud of toxic dust and ash that followed them well into the waking world, a veritable death rattle for a millenial of trauma. The fact that _the girl who taught him how to smoke isn't around_ is really what throws his whole arsonist plot into disarray. 

Or maybe he's finally bought the party line: he can't do it alone. 

It’s a terrifying thought. 

Richie tears his hands over the grass and moths, ripping into the earth, seeking to ruin everything living or dead. 

He spends the whole day there, screaming and crying and getting nowhere for any of it.

He is, however, treated to a different kind of exhaustion, hedier than that gleaned from yesterday's sobbing fits. It burns in his chest and arms, his thighs and knees. For great swaths of time, his mind is blissfully obliterated; no coherent thought can establish itself on such ruined grounds. He is all silt, no riverbed. The sounds of his own gasping breaths deafen him to all external and internal objections. 

If some kids roll up on their bikes and ask after him, Richie doesn't hear it.

If there is a private kindness he holds for himself, he doesn't know it. 

Nothing real can find him.

When the sun goes down, the lights on a lingering hatchback become more visible. Mike steps out from his vehicle and approaches Richie like one might so as not to spook a horse: his steps are evenly paced and slow.

Richie suspects he's been waiting down the block for hours, and chooses not to feel any particular way about that. 

He gets himself up. His arms and legs feel weak, his hand numb under a tacky smear of blood. He thinks about calling out--_It's me. It's Richie._\--because he isn't sure that much is apparent. 

It's less a question of how awful he looks, and more a thing of Mike knowing the cause.

Richie gets into the passenger side, anyway. 

“Thanks, Mom.”

Mike doesn't speak for some time--not until they've cleared Neibolt Street and turned on to O'Connor. It's as though he cannot stand to make light here--not sacred ground, so much, but sanctified. A massacre happened here. 

“I’m sorry,” Mike tells him, eyes on the road. The street is clear and dark, with neither trees nor lamplight there to guide them. There's just the brace of sidewalks and beyond those, neat rows of bright little houses, their occupants blissfully unaware of the evil that once haunted their sewers.

“I’m sorry I was the way I got. I’m sorry Eddie died before I could figure it all out.”

It's a lot to own up to, and Richie hasn't allowed himself enough time alone with his thoughts to decide how he feels about anything, let alone _everything._ The risk once seemed so broad, narrowing only since his options had dwindled. 

(He can’t very well fret over what he could _say_ or _do_ about what he _feels,_ has _always felt,_ since the man at the heart of those feelings was impaled and left for dead.)

Richie swallows hard and forces himself to face Mike, to decipher his tightened expression and judge its sincerity. He knows the answer already, though he hopes to be proven wrong. It'd be so much simpler to excuse his own lifetime of failure for one instance on another's part, easier to erase himself from the picture, easier to hate Mike. 

But Richie understands his particular vein of madness, and sympathizes with knowing necessity ahead of practicality. 

(Richie has achieved some level of fame through some modicum of talent, after all. Success dressed itself up as a necessary end, but ask him, and he can't tell how he got it done.) 

“Why’d you do it? Stay, I mean.” 

It's a stupid question. Richie _knows_ this. He may have forgotten a formative decade of his life, but he's got a firm enough handle on socio-economic realities. He got out of Derry because his middle class parents got new middle class jobs on the other side of the country, and there was only opportunity, not risk, in their equation to go.

“Fuck, Mike. If it was means, you should have…” Richie stops himself. There's no telling of this tale where he is anything like a hero--even in his own story he is, at best, a passerby. “I’m not saying I’m overall a nice and generous person, but if you’d called… All I’m saying is, I’ve definitely drunkenly given out my PIN and credit card number. More than once.”

Mike smiles and Richie hates it. This isn't a fun anecdote about what a sweetheart he is; it's a confession. He gets drunk, gets lonely, and surrenders hand over fist what seems safest of himself to give. He'll allow a hand in his pocket to fondle his wallet, but nothing further. 

“It wasn’t that.” 

Even if their lives had gone completely untouched by this evil, if their friendships had felt only the strain of geographic distance and linear time, some things wouldn't change. Mike would always be shy and kinder than the world was to him. Mike, Richie knows, would never ask of others what he didn't dare ask of himself. 

“It was my grandfather, you know? And my uncles. My parents, even--what I could remember. Everyone and everything I’d known was here. I was afraid to be somewhere, be someone, without them. Whatever the reputation. I didn’t think I could do it.” 

Mike barricaded himself with the world he knew; Richie got away and kept up the pace. Nothing and no-one felt too familiar for long.

“I can take you back to the Town House," Mike offers. "I was kind of hoping you’d want to stay at my place, though.”

“So sudden,” Richie says, feigning intrigue. “I mean, I guess I really should start sucking more dick. Really commit.” 

“Town House, then? You can just go door-to-door?”

“Peddling my wares. My bindle wet with… loose lube.” He sniffles, and fucking Christ, is it ever pathetic. Of course he doubles down. "Offering my skills as an… interior… _dick_orator."

Mike laughs at that, either not minding the lines are shitty, or liking that fact very much.

“I missed you guys,” he says. They roll to a stop at a light, where the road ahead of them is spotlit. “I missed my friends.”

Richie rubs too-hard at his brow, accidentally spitting open a small cut that had begun to heal. He bites his cheek and lets the pain work through him.

“Yeah, so, you didn’t give me much of a lead-in there, but I just want to be alone, I think.”

“You don’t, though.” The light changes, but Mike stays stopped; it's not as though they're holding up traffic. “Do you want to know more about It? I can show you my research--”

“Why, Mike, do you think it’ll do some good _now?”_

It's not as though Richie doesn't know what he's doing and why. Being cruel has always been a means for him to stow away and repair himself. He's only off his game; he usually knows better than to be sat in a car with the person he means to hurt. 

“I don’t, Mike.” _I don't want to know more, or see more, or be impressed by this awful thing you've had to gestate for thirty fucking years._

His thoughts take a toll; even for thinking them, he's rendered breathless.

“I’m sorry you remembered. I'm sorry you were lonely. I’m _really_ sorry you were so fucking horny for this myserty that you stayed in this shitty town.”

“You heard Bev. If we left, we would have all died.”

The words nearly break out through the backs of his teeth: _Jesus, Mike, don’t you want to? Doesn’t that feel fucking earned about now?_

They're still stopped. It's only when Richie squinted through the dark and another unwanted bout of tears that he can make out the sign for the Town House. It's across the street, not a stone's throw from all the projecting he's doing. 

“You’re right," he snips, first fighting with his seatbelt and then clamoring out of the car. "This was more fair.”

-

That night at the Town House, Richie doesn’t sleep. 

He gets a bottle of bourbon from the bar downstairs, and makes the first drink a prolonged one, so as not to confuse himself with ceremony. This isn't _for_ anybody or _to_ anything; this is a drink in hand, a singular tool with which to dull himself to the bluntness of the world around him. 

In an attempt to quiet his thoughts and collapse his body into bed, Richie proceeds to empty half the bottle.

He’s kept awake, he thinks, by the unwavering stillness of the room. Even for drinking himself sideways, nothing titters out of place. 

But the night is long. And quiet. 

It's outright disappointing; he fully expected a haunting.

-

Richie walks the whole of Derry. 

He doesn't set out to do this; with his long legs and wandering mind, it's more or less achieved through sheer coincidence. He finds himself arriving almost by accident at places Bill once had marked on his maps, and relives those boyhood afternoons set with grim reverence as they searched uselessly for any sign of Georgie. 

Richie remembers none of them ever said aloud what they knew they were looking for: a body. 

Bill used to repeat for them at every new location: _r-r-remember g-g-guys, a t-torn yellow rain s-s-slicker. A paper b-b-boat._

But of course, they all knew what Georgie looked like. 

Richie understands now why there wasn’t so much pressing urgency in those days, why Bill only really wanted to _keep looking,_ because there was no going home for him at night, knowing he’d wasted even an afternoon not trying to bring his family back together. He knew, deep down, it was an impossible task. A little boy disappears from his neighborhood and isn't found by dinnertime--he's a distinct kind of gone. It's resolute, even for his parents' sobbing denials and his big brother's guilt. Bill's drive to keep looking was a token of his guilt; his friends going along with it was a display of their sympathy. 

Richie is under no illusions he _isn't_ a grade-A asshole, but he really feels the label's sting when he argues to himself that what happened to Georgie was a tragedy, but as kids themselves, they couldn't bear it, and shouldn't have had to. They lacked agency and were--no matter Bill’s palpable guilt--never culpable for not getting him back, or losing him at all. 

This wasn’t the case for Eddie.

Eddie, who didn’t want to go into Neibolt when he was thirteen, and certainly did not want to go again at forty. 

Eddie, who stifled his screams and muffled his crying while falling in line behind the rest.

Stan had said them then, but if Richie puts his words in Eddie’s mouth, they fit: _You’re not my friends. You’re not my friends. You made me go into Neibolt. It’s your fault. You left me._

It's worse, Richie decides, because Eddie wasn’t an unforeseen tragedy. Eddie didn't disappear; they took him to that awful place, spent his goodwill and wasted his bravery, and then--when he was more of a corpse than Georgie had ever been--they left him behind. 

He thinks of Eddie being flushed out of Derry’s underbelly. His body, either sliding piecemeal through some crack in the broken terrain, or shooting out through a geyser. He finds he wants it, hopes for it--that Eddie might have a kind of inherent, self-possessed freedom now, if never before.

He visits the quarry, walks the river. Recalling the maps uncovered by Ben and Bill, he knows every possible means this devil of a town can excrete those it swallows up. His gaze is perpetually downcast, but his eyes are sharp. He looks for that red jacket, smudges of sky blue against the earth, a pale face left slashed and stunned.

But still beautiful.

Richie hadn't meant to think it--in the restaurant, at the Town House, in the Barrens, in Neibolt, in the cistern--but Eddie was beautiful. All the inherent intensity of his youth hadn’t wavered, but rather focused, and drawn around his eyes. Boundless panic had given itself towards sharpness, both in character and presentation. Richie _had_ to put a chair between them; it was just his luck why it was empty. 

He teased Ben to prove there was nothing he’d hide, and what’s more--that there was no deeper space inside himself in which to store thoughts, doubts, and desires. 

He slips on a stone, and Richie’s sneakered-foot plunges into the cool creek waters. He jerks back a few steps, looks around, wets his lips, then--nothing. He carries on.

Richie, who has been talking to himself incoherently and non-stop since he was a babbling infant (and such things were misidentified as normal), finds he has nothing to say. There are no stunted little bursts of conversation to be had with himself as he wanders his hometown, hoping to come across and recover the bloated, brutalized corpse of his first love. 

-

Days creep by, and Richie with them. Staying in Derry is a thing he initially thought could be achieved without total acknowledgment, except eventually someone shows up from the front desk of the Town House and hassles him for payment on the room. 

He fishes a credit card out of his wallet, stares too-long at its matte black coloring and heavy metallic text, and wonders how he’d ever let himself believe he’d gotten as far away as this. The _Richard Tozier_ with a credit score and Netflix money is, in this moment, a fictitious rendering. Little Richie Trashmouth thought him up like a character, drew him tall, made his voice flat and unaffected. 

He pretends he doesn’t know Mike is likewise sticking around, pushing off his overdue (it really was a good line) departure just to keep an eye on him. Richie almost feels bad about it, but more than that--

He _feels_ like Mike, or what he imagines what Mike is: less a man now than a force of nature. He wasn’t some passive body, wholly unexpectant of the murder and chaos to start up again; he was lying in wait all those years knowing it would.

Richie isn't so patient with the world around him; he flits and moves about it, existing in five minute sets within personas forcibly amputated from reality. He draws from a well of endless leniency for himself, but he is his own mirage marcarading as an oasis. Richie himself is unsustainable.

An imaginary life is a precariousness he accepts for himself, bruised and small and worthless as he is. 

Such cowardice--ambulating about, feigning purpose--is unacceptable for others, least of all Eddie. 

Decades too late, Richie feels inclined towards action. 

He decides to say something, if only that. 

He files himself into the police department, is sat at an overstuffed desk, and told to wait for a designated officer to discuss this particular missing person case.

The officer is older, with a shiny bald spot Richie feels he can see his future in, and has a patent look of pity he puts on like a baseball cap. He's none of the young guys Richie saw at the Town House. 

Richie's not a sobbing young mother, and he seems more morose than anxious, so at first Officer Jerry Guleski doesn't seem to know what to do with him. He thinks maybe Richie is going to report a missing pigeon; he's gotten a couple of those before. 

"Let's hear it." 

Richie slides into Derry PD's version of events, into Mike's careful framing. He gives enough of the truth that a story forms itself, a tight circle of a thing, wholly absent of millenia-old demonic clowns and childhood blood oaths. 

Home for a visit, he says. 

Met up for dinner. (Their little party was well remembered for both the mess and the tip.)

Back to the Town House for the night to reminisce. 

Explored the town the next day, finding things hadn't changed so much as just gone into disrepair.

With respect to the following evening at the Town House, Richie offers a vague recollection towards some kind of commotion, a broken window, a scream--maybe. He can’t be sure, he says, he'd taken an ambien. (He has a whole bit about the stuff; dated and tired to say the least, but it’s what Netflix auto-plays for his special.)

Now, his friend is gone.

Derry police are as lax in their discretion as they are in their investigations. Like a hot piece of gossip, Richie is told their working theory: Henry Bowers escaped Juniper Hill Asylum and initiated a bloodbath. 

Only, the story didn't start there.

"This is some real Nancy Grace, HLN shit," Jerry says, conspiring with Richie over a green paper plate with a slab of dried-out birthday cake laid on it (he nabbed the "TIRE" in "HAPPY RETIREMENT, CAROL"). 

Richie is told--like it's some great secret, not the literal talk of the town for six months after the fact--that, per his initial arrest report, Bowers was mirandized and taken in over his own ferocious mantra: _I’m not done. I’m not fucking done. I’ve got to kill them all._

Opportunity struck when Bowers came across a familiar face. A scuffle answers for Eddie’s blood in the Town House, and Bowers’, and a nearby sighting. The altercation made its way to the Derry Public Library, where Bowers--fucking nutjob that he was--accidentially did himself in with the business end of a machette. 

Richie listens, dumbstruck. It’s spoken as inherent truth, but it's _Mike's story,_ practically word-for-word. Richie sees it for a survival mechanism on Mike's part: he's stayed in Derry and suffered for it, but what's more, he took from his captor. He harbored Derry's secrets and stole its language. 

"So where is Eddie Kaspbrak?" 

Richie asks this as if he thinks, with just a little push, they'll all get there together. A murder clown on a cosmic timer. Missing kids. Terror in the water supply.

Jerry, looking annoyed that Richie isn't satisfied with the gory tale, consults his notes. Like Eddie left a forwarding address.

"Ah, okay… so, asthmatic, short--"

"5'9" is average."

"New Yorker," Jerry says, definitive, and Richie just stares. The officer gives up and admits his department's collective thinking: "Mr. Kaspbrak went toe-to-toe with the devil. Got pricked for his trouble. Chances are, he bled out." 

Richie feels his face grow hot. He feels sick. He glances to his left and spies a perforated waste basket. 

“That’s what you’re gonna tell his wife? Chances are?”

Jerry makes another face. He is genuinely surprised for the pushback, and for that, revisits a nearer well. 

“You his wife, sunshine?” 

Jerry flips through the file and punctuates his point with the photo of Eddie they received from Myra. The picture is from some work function--Eddie is dressed in a sharp suit, but looks uncomfortable. His smile is strained. And in the context of being missing, he doesn't much look eager to be found and returned. 

"I mean…"

It's a dismissal from even the illusion of hope. Jerry loses the look of pity and bears his true face: disinterest. He spears his dry cake with a plastic fork while Richie swallows down a tacky-tasting sickness. 

"He's braver than you think."

-

An escaped murderer is as simple and clean a solution as anyone could ask for. It shuts Myra up, anyway, who, when she calls, insists she always knew this would happen. 

She _only_ calls. As far as Richie can discern from his now routine visits to the Derry police station, she doesn’t come down. Her husband is missing, presumed dead. She’s told he was attacked and that seems to be the long and short of it; he surely did not survive.

Richie ruminates bitterly on the thought, which itself hangs static overhead, a pallid danger, like sneakers thrown over a telephone wire. Something _happened,_ someone _lost._

Nevermind surviving Bowers, surviving the leper, surviving his worst fears. Eddie Kaspbrak’s demise is a safe bet.

Maybe the idling dismissal of a lost soul--the notion and its acceptance rolled into one--that cast a shadow over Derry is present in Myra, too. Maybe that part was never otherworldly, just a personal choice. Maybe it’s hopelessness, not cruelty, that turns heads away from the truth.

Outside the police station, Richie gets a call on his cell. His thoughts having tethered him elsewhere, he lacks enough awareness to screen it. 

His agent--who, _Christ,_ reminds him a lot of Eddie--and, _fuck,_ is this going to be a thing now?--doesn't wait for a greeting before demanding an explanation. 

“Why am I reading on Twitter that you trashed a Chinese restaurant and screamed at a child?”

Richie drops himself down on a bench favoring a shady stretch of sidewalk. It’s like flipping a switch: suddenly, he’s exhausted. Suddenly, he can barely keep his eyes open. 

He says, "Hi, Tom."

He thinks about asking how it all looks out there, but fears Tom will answer him honestly, and admit Richie’s being dragged to shit for disappearing, then cancelling sold out shows without a moment’s notice. And when he does reemerge, like some fated lagoon creature, it’s only to be sighted across the country, in some small town that has no business trying its hand at Chinese food. 

He says instead, “I thought the child was evil incarnate and the Chinese food was looking at me.”

Tom is silent. Then: “Rich, let me come get you.”

“No.”

“Rich. Richie. Buddy.” Richie prepares himself to hear Tom quote from his contract, or cite all the sold out theatres on his tour schedule--which, of course, he has memorized. He does neither. 

Very tentatively, Tom prompts, “Does this have something to do with Stanley Uris?”

It should be, he supposes, a pleasant surprise when the world comes crashing down around him for a second time that weekend. It suggests some of it was held in place after the last collapse, balancing on pillars and lean-tos. 

(Who is he kidding; Richie Tozier’s whole world has all the interior intricacies of a pile of Lincoln Logs.) 

“What did you say? What the fuck did you say? How--_how the fuck do you know that name, Tom?”_

“You got a letter--”

“You read my fucking mail?”

“After the stalker? We talked about this, Richie, anyone who writes a letter is fucking insane to begin with. Your words.” Tom stops, takes a breath. He’s usually and purposefully very calm and patient with Richie, finding a gentle touch gets him further than not. "It reads like a suicide note, Rich. Sort of." 

Richie immediately starts to cry. It’s emblematic of a radical shift inside him, an alteration at his very core. It's his body saying, _I'm broken. Here's how._ Tom hears this and, having never heard it before, is cowed into abashed silence. He listens as his client of many years, and friend of just a few shy of that, wails. 

“That’s private. That letter is private. Stan is--Stan was--”

“Richie, Rich,” Tom interrupts with a dozen instances of his friend’s name, layering them in amid shuddered breaths and wet refusals. He realizes he sounds equally as desperate when he shouts, “Please tell me what is going on!” 

Tom is met by a wall of silence on the other line, and thinks briefly that Richie’s ended the call. He quickly hears it for something more familiar, and can picture it: Richie, eyes closed, face contorted, body pitched forward so that he forms an elongated “f” shape. 

Richie says, “I might be implicated in a murder.”

It’s somehow less surprising than the crying. Tom dutifully awaits the necessary follow-up.

"Not the child’s. Although--yeah, that happened.” 

He goes on, “Probably won’t be implicated, these cops are fucking incompetent, but--maybe." 

And, “I’m not making my Reno dates.”

“Or San Francisco.”

“I need a break.” 

Richie is miserable for saying so, and Tom knows why. They both do; it’s career suicide. The sentiment presses itself like a kiss to both their foreheads. Tom winces for its delivery, but Richie presses into it. He wants those lips to peel back to reveal teeth, wants those crushed against his skull, and beyond that--sunken into the meat of his frontal lobe. 

Career suicide is pedestrian; half the comics he first toured with tried their collective sausage hands at it twice a week for kicks.

A voice that terrifyingly sounds nothing like Pennywise but entirely like himself asks, _Why not the real thing, Trashmouth?_

He says, "I'm gay." 

He says, “I’m gay and _I need a fucking break, Tom.”_

He ends the call and drops his head into shaking hands.

He thinks quietly, _fuck._ And loudly, _FUCK._ And prolongedly, _FUUUUUCK._

“You might wanna not say that out loud, around here.”

Although it’s very much in line with Richie’s running mental commentary, the suggestion comes from the outside--from a young man, hands in his jeans pockets, plaid shirt gaping at the throat.

Face red, jaw swollen.

Pretty eyes.

Richie glances from the man to the ground again. 

“Fuck you,” he says, trying for harsh but managing little more than a whisper. If he could access anything like pride, he’d have the wherewithal to be mortified for the display.

The man doesn’t move. 

“I mean it,” he says. Richie tries to determine if he is threatening or malicious, but the only thing he knows for sure is the man sounds tired. “For your own safety. Don’t.”

The man is gone when Richie next looks up. He sees him walking down the park path towards main street. 

Tom calls back immediately, and though Richie was expecting as much--dreading it, really--he’s laid flat by Tom’s outright indignation. 

"You know _I'm_ gay? That guy who’s always around is my husband? You went to our fucking wedding--?"

His voice is ragged and high-pitched by the time Richie cuts into it, feeling like he’s pulled some impossibly cruel trick. He’s known Tom for years, even briefly lived with him and his then-fiance, putting a permanent ass-impression in their couch and teaching their labradoodle swear-laden commands. _Fuckin’ sit. Fuckin’ stay._

"No, yeah, I know. But it works for you." Richie is still bent in half on the park bench, head pitched towards his knees, vision blurring as he stares at the ground under his feet. “It doesn’t… it’s not working for me.”

Tom is silent.

Richie can hear someone in the background, their voice fading fast as Tom makes a swift retreat towards privacy.

A door closes.

Gently, Tom says, "Rich. Buddy." 

Richie can’t bear it.

He’s always feared the violence he associates with the disclosure he’s now made, the inevitability of harm unto its speakers. 

He hasn’t prepared himself for pity. 

He ends the call in a panic. 

His phone comes alive again with the arrival of texts, a move Richie recognizes and regrets having instigated. Tom only ever texts when he’s worried Richie won’t answer him. There was a night, once, delineating the technique, when both men were sat at a bar, Richie having just bombed an important gig, and Tom wasting his breath saying, _Fuck it. Next time._ Richie nodded distractedly at first, then less and less, then not at all. Despondent, he went inside himself. He traversed the miserable path that led him here, realized he could not foresee a different route, that he was always destined for this.

It's a hoot, he suspects, if you're a success. An unmitigated failure… less so.

Tom, while sat next to Richie and sick of his unnatural silence, sent a text saying the same thing: _[Fuck it. Next time.]_

With Richie in Derry and exuding a similar air of ruin, Tom writes to him twice in swift succession: _[Please don't do anything. Please call me if you start thinking about doing something.]_ and _[I give a shit about you.]_

Richie forces himself to write back, _[I know.]_

And, _[Your priorities are seriously fucked.]_

And even, _[Thanks.]_

It seems an opportune moment, his rock bottom showing a small, slow incline. 

But Richie gets no further. The whole of Tom’s response implodes his accepted reality and, in an instant, installs something new. He is a developing country being invaded by a superpower: there are bombs and crying and fanfare and suddenly, he’s outside the borders of existence. He’s stateless and wandering. 

The truth was mishandled, the army sent in on bad intel. 

He starts to stand because he can’t sit, and mope, and convince himself he’s just irreparably changed his life when that single truth does not announce itself with lightning bolts, cantaloupe-sized hail, and God himself, half-naked, taint eclipsing the sun, parting his godly robes to take a literal shit on Richie’s face.

Richie isn't hurt. He isn't dead. Tom probably doesn’t hate him.

The only cataclysmic outcome is Richie again coming face-to-face with his monumental cowardice. 

He gets himself up, off the bench. He walks back in the direction of the Barrens. 

There is still something real that happened, something awful and full of consequence. And Richie intends to search for the body.

-

Bev and Ben are in the Town House lobby when Richie returns that evening, slinking in under a blackening sky. They're sat with Mike in the bar area, a spread of burgers and fries between them on an antique coffee table.

Their expressions are kind and warm, and Richie is only absently concerned that he reeks of sweat and river water. 

"I'm more of a nug man," he says when they pass him a red-and-white bag. It's a blatant excuse to see himself off to his room, but Bev isn't having it.

"I remembered," Bev tells him. She shakes the bag. 

Beside her, Ben can't help but stare and smile, as in awe of her cool confidence now as he ever was in their youth. 

If it's possible, the pair are even more beautiful for being well-rested and shower-fresh. Bev is a classic beauty in jeans and a white tee, a jacket thrown over the back of her chair. Richie clocks Ben's biceps before his face--the soft, threadbare t-shirt he's wearing doesn't give onlookers much of a choice. 

Ben passes him a can of soda. 

"Root Beer, right? A&W, not Barq's, never Mug?"

"Yeah, no, I still don't drink dumpster sweat." 

The others, he notices, have drink cups to match the bagged burgers and fries. They went out of their way to find Richie a can of his favorite soda--at least, his favorite when he was thirteen years old, when an ideal meal consisted of ice cream, chicken tenders, and mayonnaise. 

He's not that person anymore. His arteries have been spared while his liver takes a direct hit, but beyond that--he can't go back to that person, can't access him. He was torn open and exposed long before the confrontation with Pennywise; he ended that summer in a way the others didn't. 

A hand squeezes his forearm, but Richie finds he can't look Mike in the eye when the man follows up with a warm greeting.

_Yeah, uh, hi Mike. Have you thought anymore on the fact that, despite fully understanding how you suffered all this time, wanted and deserved a way out, and probably went a little bit insane, I still blame you for all this?_

His friends of thirty years--he supposes the gap is now a span of time, given what has trespassed--really did get him a child's helping of chicken nuggets. Richie tears a few of them to shreds, masticating with his hands because he knows his stomach can't take the genuine article. 

He gives up the game quick enough. He offers his thanks and excuses himself, admitting he's tired.

Literally: "Thanks. But. I'm tired." 

It's a mistake to traverse upstairs alone. The police removed their crime scene accoutrement, but left all evidence of said crime. The staff--what little there is flitting about the Town House--wiped down the banisters and wall. All this succeeded in doing was rendering Eddie's escape more blurred, more pink, less direct. 

Richie hurries past, the smell of blood chasing after him, bullying the lingering scent of charred meat and fries to take center stage amid his olfactory nerves. 

He sits on his bed.

Lays on it.

He kicks off one shoe, but loses gumption to take on the other.

Bev comes into his room. 

There are no _whys_ or _hows,_ it’s only a point of fact.

Richie listens as she takes off her shoes, feels her weight as she joins him on the bed. She settles in beside him and draws a knitted throw loosely over their two uncovered bodies. She doesn't ask to do this, but Richie doesn't question it. Bev brings him close, holds him, bears him like a child.

Richie even accepts it for a while, thoroughly taken by her kindness and--for a moment--inclined to believe love and comfort have all the appeal people say they do. 

It slips away from him.

He watches it go, the scoreboard dropping back down to zero as the feeling turns on its heel and sashays away.

“You’re back.” Although he doesn't phrase it as such, the question is inherent.

“It was Ben’s idea. Stay just outside of town for a few days, see what happened before we got too far, or far enough, and…” 

"Don't bury the lead. You guys fucked a bunch on crunchy hotel sheets, too.” 

If he can do this, he thinks dimly, if he can play the part, she'll let them both pretend there's enough inside to sustain himself. He'll try his luck in the world, and when ultimately he fails, she won't feel as though she never tried to tell him better. 

“A lady doesn’t kiss and tell.”

“So that’s Ben’s excuse, what’s yours?” 

He remembers how she laughed so delightedly at dinner, how giggles tiered out of her bright and pure as fingers lighting across piano keys. 

She doesn’t do that, now.

“You still remember?”

She nods her agreement against his spine, then rests with her cheek to his neck, warmth transferring between the two now at every point of contact. “The others do, too.”

"Bill," Richie clarifies. One man does not constitute scads of others.

And at once he feels sick for letting one of his best friends disappear back into his other life without a proper goodbye. Richie's ashamed they didn't speak; he meant to tell him he thought Bill was insanely brave--and outright insane--for wanting to look for his little brother that summer. Richie wants to tell him now he understands, and he's sorry, and he forgives Bill all the more for punching him in the face. 

_I deserved that. And if you wanted another…_

“What are you doing here, Richie?” Bev draws him back with that impossible question.

It's so obvious, he thinks, but he's so emotionally buried, she has to ask to make certain _he's_ aware. 

“If you’re staying because you don’t want to forget, or…” 

“If I knew what I was doing, I think I'd look less constipated doing it," Richie jokes, but it won't get him off the hook now. He's stood in front of her, a gun in each hand, asking dumbly, _What, me? Shoot myself?_

“I looked for his body,” Richie admits. He hates the way she holds him a little tighter; it means he sounds as shattered as he feels. It means the loss they all suffered has--in only a few short days--changed his shape, maybe the very atoms that make up his lanky form, and allowed for contact. His body does not hum and stagger away; it cedes to newfound necessity. “In the Barrens, along the river… all the places feet and arms turned up that summer.”

The room is silent. Richie feels his jaw lock around his words. He senses Bev holding her breath, like she can’t bear to disrupt what may never come.

"I don't want to leave him here, Bev." 

_In the sewers, where we took him twice more than he ever wanted to go._

_In a mass grave._

_In the dark._

_In Derry._

Then, without warning, his body is curving, tucking so resolutely into itself that the spine forms a tight “c.” For as much as he wanted to disappear these past few days, now is the first time Richie’s thinking he actually might. 

It’s all circled around a great, gasping breath that doesn’t fill him. It’s all in gathering steam for an empty sob. 

Even as Richie’s legs draw up and his whole sense seems to cinche, Bev never loses him. Her embrace refuses his attempts to run, and soon, he’s breathing again. His nerve endings unspool into her touch, a relief-shaped thing that’s nothing of the kind. 

“What's going to happen to me?”

He means, for being caught in the deadlights.

He means, will he be terrorized in 80s technicolor or science’s latest variation of HD? 

He means, will Eddie only ever visit his nightmares and never his dreams? 

He means, does she think he can stand it? 

He realizes, given the topic of conversation, Bev could answer him differently. She could hear him practically, not metaphysically. Of course, he already knows the words: emotionally damaged, sexually stunted, disconnected. They're harder to read if he tears a joke in front of them, obscuring reality with verbal confetti. 

He doesn't correct himself, believing Bev knows him well enough not to bother with what is practical.

She tucks in closer. 

“The past two nights, I haven’t seen anything." It makes sense: the deadlights went out. For as badly as Mike bungled the ritual, they turned lightness into dark--eventually. “Most peaceful sleep of my life.”

She waits him hen prompts, “No jokes?”

“How was it, before?”

No jokes, then.

“Nothing I could really remember until coming back," Bev tells him. Then she's quiet; it's a revelation for her to speak aloud and genuinely about how she was changed that summer, what she saw. In some distant way it troubled her in much the same way as her father’s transgressions, hence her silence. She felt broken into and filled up by some awful, terrifying thing: an old man, a budding psychopath, a timeless demon. They felt interchangeable. 

“I wasn’t sure who I’d see here. At the restaurant, even. Because I saw all of us, going like Stan did. Not everyone was so deliberate, but…" she struggles to identify what clues her visions offered, and settles on, "It felt influenced. Decided.”

“What--”

She answers without hesitation, as if her psyche can't stand to keep these massive secrets any longer, and Richie himself is so pliable a candidate for their taking. She expels horror into the nape of his neck, whispers madness into his hair. 

"Bill drowned. Ben fell. Mike was… attacked.” she saw some glimpses, or knew details without seeing them, by mostly--he felt the veins of fear and followed them to their ports. Terror, helplessness, panic. Each laid unique fingerprints in their particular crime scene.

“My husband killed me. Not even the current one--my next.” She laughs, but Richie hears the rattle in her voice and knows she is so, so ashamed. 

“Eddie… another car accident. Or maybe I only ever saw the first.” She imparts a squeeze around his middle, meeting their bodies but saying nothing for their congress except, “And _you,_ Richie Tozier.”

She sounds fucking pissed. Richie would have lived for exactly this three decades ago--attention, even from a girl he thought was _kinda cool,_ but didn't get the big fuss about. 

"You did a sold out show in Los Angeles. Your next was in San Francisco. You drove instead to Pasadena, and jumped off the Colorado Street Bridge, I guess, so as not to be a cliche.” 

She says this angrily, like he’s betrayed her somehow. Like he _will._

And Richie’s skin prickles in realization: he’s been to those bridges before. He’s always appreciated the view--across, and towards some distant horizon, _sure._ It's classic. 

And down, too. There was a greatness innate in the plunge towards dark, cold waters. He liked to take a breath and tip forward, feel the perilousness of his glasses sliding down his nose. He liked feeling the air arise from a different direction--almost as if he was floating in it.

He’s almost warmed by the notion he went through with it. _Goes through with it,_ rather, if Bev has indeed seen their miserable futures.

It's definitive. It's purposeful. He thinks, there will be no doubts about Richie Tozier if he throws himself off a bridge. It will always be the one banner to raise above the rest. Was he queer? Depressed? A liar? A loser?

It's a distinction without a difference; he's dead.

He buries his face more deliberately into his pillow.

_Doesn't matter,_ he sort-of-says into the down. About the deadlights keeping him up. _I'm not sleeping, anyway._

She smooths a hand over his hair as she informs him that's nothing supernatural. He’s heartbroken. He’s mourning. 

He turns his head just an inch. There are things he still needs to know, and it's not a matter of being able to sleep at night for knowing them. These things may just as well echo back and forth from his heart to his head in perpetuity. 

“Did you know, when we went down there, that Eddie wouldn’t make it out?”

“I didn’t see it," Bev tells him. She sounds far away, maybe miles. Richie feels the warmth and wetness of her breath but commits instead to what he feels: they're being flung far from one another, her into sky, him through the earth.

“I swear, Richie. Even before, when we were kids. I saw the battle, I saw him in it.” 

“So something changed,” Richie says--slowly, as if he means to never reach the thought’s necessary end. “In the moment.”

“I gave him the fence post.”

“I told him he was brave.” It is the graver sin, Richie thinks. And he didn't stop there. "And I--I fucked up, I needed saving. And Bill had just yelled at him. And he was so scared. He was just scared--"

Bev braces Richie against another bout of silent sobs. 

There’s no stopping them; he is overrun. They rack through his body, tumbling down the hollows of bones and bouncing around where the muscle is weakest. They trip him up at every step so that he never quite lands; absent even a face-crushing touchstone, he is cartwheeling forever. There’s nothing to say that can be known, or can’t be denied by the same shuddered breath.

Bev doesn’t want to revel in the tremendous guilt they both feel, though admittedly she feels less alone herself for wading in after Richie. It’s like the quarry: there are shallower spaces than she cares to think about, given all those afternoons spent hurling themselves off a cliff, their bodies cutting through more sky than water.

In the bed, she bends her knees and curls her toes, tucking in for protection. She imagines they’re taking the leap together, and encircles Richie in her arms--one fit over his middle, the other tracing his spine and spilling fingers into his hair--and tries to keep him afloat.

Richie does finally sleep: all day, and well into the night. It’s as though consciousness has broken over his own head, however, as he’s spared even the resemblance of restfulness. 

He awakes in the middle of the night to a flat and quiet dark. 

When his eyes adjust, he can just barely make out Ben, sat in a chair in the corner, a blanket drawn over his body, missing his socked feet.

Richie recalls the conversation they'd had in this very room--before Neibolt, before everything that could have gone wrong went wildly that way. Ben had wedged his broad shoulders in the doorway and tried his hand at convincing Richie to stay. 

_What did you see out there?_

_A whole fucking clown, man, and when did that stop being enough?_

He remembers Ben told him his experience--Pennywise taking Bev’s form, taunting him with her repulsion. He spared no detail, no matter how disparaging or ugly. 

_I wanted her to see me. I was too terrified to ask her to look._

Richie remembers wanting to scream.

He stuffed his toothbrush into his duffle. He snuffed out yet another opportunity to announce himself, to be understood in much the same context, to be read as human and hurting and desperate and tired. 

He said, like he didn’t know or couldn’t care, _Fucking sucks. Sorry to hear it. Bye._

What halted him, ultimately, was mass.

_(What is mass?)_

Ben wasn’t going to let him through the door.

He said things like, _If you want to give up on yourself, Richie, that’s one thing. But don't condemn the rest of us._

He made promises. 

_We can do this. I know we can. Together._

He paid compliments. 

_You haven’t changed. You’ll still do anything for your friends._

Richie remembers muttering something agreeable. He remembers setting his duffle on the bed, but keeping hold of the strap. He remembers Ben’s appreciative smile, his confidence, his trust. 

And at his first opportunity, Richie made his escape out a balcony window. 

Richie stares unseeingly around the room he--upon a second sentence--has chosen to imprison himself in. He thinks it’s too spacious for a tomb, but as much could be said of the bed, too. He thinks that of his body, which he knows is too long because there is surely not enough of him to fill up the form. He raises his hands to cover his face.

No one can see him, but--

Just in case someone plans to look.

Richie listens to Ben and Bev’s breathing and tries to care to hear his own.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lmao yey it’s over, thank fucking fuck. I hope it was enjoyable.
> 
> Thank y'all for reading. I appreciate it :)

Richie feels like he's the wrong side of youthful, skulking around Disneyland six feet behind his parents, who don’t want to be there anymore than he does, but are willfully forcing him to make happy memories.

The level of detail in his estimation is accessible because the instance is true.

He remembers the summer clearly: his parents, agitated all spring, finally make the fitful descent into _concerned._ Richie was born an obnoxious little shit--a revving engine of perpetual chaos--and he's still that, but the quiet moments are dead quiet. At the dinner table, he turns inside himself and finds there’s no place to go. 

He seems _sad._

They're concerned that they're past the point of developmental issues--this is steady, feels heavy, tastes permanent when they roll it around in their mouths, trying to name the thing their son has become. 

He is fifteen years old and his parents have spotted the very edge of something they don’t yet know will consume Richie for a lifetime: he hates himself. 

Overtly, he swings the other way, acting far too pleased with his jokes and trumpeted nihilist tendencies. But he never again makes friends like the ones he ran with back home. He never complains for their absence--hell, it seems to his parents he’s outright forgotten them--but it’s obvious he’s lonely, and never found a comparable substitute to that wild, swearing, perpetually-muddy horde. 

That’s what his respectable parents see: a once ultraviolet light going dim. Richie has a different view: his father looks tan and healthy. His mother has a car phone which she _loves_ to say she’s using. They go on date nights and order in Chinese food. They’re happy, here. 

He turns it around within the year, faking enough smiles, enough jokes. He opens the plastic lid on a tupperware full of self-contained laughter--for them. 

Richie finds it’s easy to please people when you have no relation with your inner self, and no mind for your own best interests. He likes that they care about him. It almost feels like caring about himself.

It's one moment in time recreating itself: he's in the backseat of Ben and Bev's rental, posted up in the middle seat so they can both keep an eye on him. The vehicle still smells like last night’s burgers and fries, which gets him thinking about life’s mundane little ventures, and how he can’t imagine picking himself up off the ground and venturing towards something--anything--with as much initiative. 

Soon, they’re at the public library, and then Mike’s place at its peak, and Mike is passing along some old Derry blueprints to Ben. Their excitement is tempered by the idea of bringing anything of this town back into the world, though Ben doesn’t mean to share it, and Mike knows his friend better than to believe he would. 

He’s trashed the place, otherwise. Black garbage bags are stuffed with Derry lore, with murder, with chaos. The meat is stripped off, all rotten and untenable. What’s left are the bones. 

Derry will never inspire Ben’s designs; they’re more of a cautionary tale. The idea spreads itself open at the back of his mind, unfurling a myriad of ways to better explain what it is his designs stand in antithesis to, and _why._ How is loneliness built into a town? He’s been scoffed at and asked as much--admittedly, not since his work gained worldwide recognition, though he still senses the sentiment from a certain clientele. 

He can answer that now, and then some. How are people--normal, average people, stood under an open sky--crushed? 

Exhibit A: Derry, Maine. 

Bev saddles up to Richie. He’s at the very top of the stairs, looking like he’s considered throwing himself down them. This space--mostly emptied, now--has been all Mike’s known for twenty-seven years. In taking up what was once a slightly creepy interest of Ben’s, Mike’s built it into a lifestyle. It’s his own brand of denial: the lingering doubt that they’d defeated anything at thirteen, that the evil in Derry could be summoned and slaughtered in a night, that it’s horrors weren’t daily occurrences, at once systematic and yet entirely unique to their purveyors. Mike’s dug in deep here, but Derry’s one him one better, and swallowed him whole.

Bev is struck with the same regret as Richie: _We left him here._

She curls an arm around one of his and turns to speak directly into his clavicle. It’s as far as she reaches, and she doesn’t mean to be subtle. Hell--they’ve slept together. By Richie’s count, the list of people he can hold both that thought and a fond feeling in his chest for number at about two and a half, maybe three. 

“Do you want to come with us?”

Richie jolts, and Bev counts herself lucky he didn’t fall back a step and send them both down the narrow stairway. He stills in due time and--chin tucked low, shoulders slumped, curly hair an uncombed mess--seems to muffle his own body in addition to his speaking.

“Is this, like, a sex thing, or a mommy and daddy thing?” He gives his eyebrows a waggle. “Little of column A, little of column B?” 

“It’s a, ‘you don’t have to keep punishing yourself’ thing.”

“Oh, no, I don’t like that thing.” 

He finds he wants her to smirk, to somehow glorify the moment where he sinks himself into dread, but ceases to feel its touch. 

“Don’t stay too long,” Bev says.

Richie answers that he will take that under advisement--a lie, but not one he tells well, which Bev finds she can accept. She draws him in for a hug.

“I mean it.” 

She's quiet and gentle for saying so, but no less intense than when she'd screamed at them—_them!_ a horde of not-yet-thirteen-year-old boys!--to stick together, to bear witness to a bathroom one might sooner find at the Overlook Hotel, to rally to action, to kill a clown. 

“I don’t have to go back to my old life, but I can’t stay here?”

He takes her resolute silence in the affirmative.

She keeps close to his side, her body flush against his as she gleans support from him, offered or not.

“It’ll always hurt,” she says, despondent on his behalf. “But it’ll hurt differently, after a while.”

"It's not about him," Richie says, lying through his teeth and pretending Bev will believe a word of it. 

He says, "It’s me. I had a pretty shitty weekend.” 

He says, “I lost my cool jacket.”

He insists, “I'm a fairly accomplished narcissist." 

She breathes, and it’s enough to pin him to the wall. 

"You can miss Stanley, and Eddie, and everything you never had. You should. But there's still a future for you. It can be more than this, if you believe it can."

He wants to ask if she’s seen it. If, in whatever shred of the cosmos was imbued in Pennywise, was there any glimmer of hope for him? Could she swear on those lives that were left, though in no way spared of their collective ordeal?

There’s time enough to ask, and space. Mike won’t rush them out of his attic home, Ben won’t whisk her away; she won’t be moved if she means to stand. She’ll let his plea intrude on her peace of mind, and it won’t even be the worst thing anyone has asked of her. _Defend the life I don’t want to live,_ he could say, and she would try her damndest. 

The question--nor the task of asking--is what holds his tongue.

It’s too much to _know_ that he might be happy.

It’s too much feel this way now, as resolute in sorrow as he was in love, and know if one could pass, why not the other? And if the twisting, turmoltulous combination of devotion and adoration he’s held in his heart for Eddie Kaspbrak can’t stand against another twenty-seven years, what the fuck is wrong with him?

He asks, “Do you think Ben will blow in my ear if I start crying again?”

-

Richie and Mike watch Ben and Bev drive away. The windows are down on their rental, and there’s so much sun caught in Bev’s hair and light strewn through Ben’s eyes that Richie forgets for a moment what all has happened, what all they did. 

He doesn't blame them for taking all their vibrant beauty and hardwon happiness and skipping town. If he could fathom something comparable, he'd do the same.

He tries to imagine. 

At his most fantastical, he sees him and Eddie, driving top-down in his audacious cherry red convertible, coasting through the desert, Richie intent on making his Reno dates, Eddie feeling like he's riding his childhood bike again, but not stopping every block for a puff on his inhaler. After the shows they’ll keep driving, venture through Yosemite, and when they hit the coast--maybe Monterey Bay where Richie was once held up for a show by a sea lion sunning on the hood of his car--they’ll turn around and keep driving. 

Also, they're married.

Also, Richie's told him a handjob in a moving car is wholly comparable to a beej. He won't prove it, but getting the opportunity to try is victory enough. 

Richie scales it back, settling on having only the confidence and humility to ask for what he desperately wants, and the easy coolness to accept whatever he gets. 

_Nope,_ that devilish voice of ruin reminds him. _Bring it on home._

At his luckiest, Richie would have a corpse riding shotgun. 

The vision is so precise--Eddie is crushed, his skin sallow and firm, yellowing. His lovely, dark eyes are eaten out of their sockets. His body a crooked broken tetris piece. Insects and bacteria have eaten onto his wound and opened it up, spreading skin across a ribcage like window curtains. There isn't anything left to identify him, save for the heartache Richie feels. 

Richie loses his breath and, in his vision, crashes the car. 

Over a bridge.

They'll both get what they're due.

He comes out of it realizing it's nothing implanted in him, around him, or for him by some dark force. This is his own creation, a bodily excretion borne of his worst instincts.

"Richie."

Richie jumps.

Mike stares, sympathetic.

The sun is out in Derry, but they're stood in the shadow of the library.

"Bill's been asking after you," Mike says, sort of gesturing with his phone, as if Richie thinks they're communicating through some other medium. With cosmic demon clowns on the playing field, he supposes he can't be sure what all has ruptured from reality. 

"I'm not staying," Richie says. The sun is too-bright overhead, but he's squinting regardless of that. His offer to cry isn't off the table yet; more appropriately, it is rotating around on a Lazy Susan. "Okay? I'm just not leaving. Yet."

Mike nods. 

_Story of my life,_ he says, but doesn't. 

What comes instead is: "I'm going to visit Patricia Uris on my way down south. Tell her what a good person Stan was, that there are people whose lives he touched, people who will remember him fondly."

It's an incredible burden. Richie knows this much, because he'd never offer to do it.

And still, _even knowing that,_ he makes the requisite dick move.

He asks, "Is that enough?"

"It's all there is." 

Mike speaks with the confidence of trial and error, the tiredness of certainty. His parting lesson is this: memory is important. It should be made full and beautiful.

"Give Bill a call." 

Mike lets him off with just that. Richie stuffs his hands in his pockets and stalks down the sidewalk, deciding he's due for another visit to the Barrens. 

He gets as far as the treeline before the guilt--long at his heels, now fully mauling his leg--of ignoring his holding friend gets the better of him. 

"Richie!" is how Bill answers his call, a millisecond off the first ring. Without delay, he starts in with an apology for running off. 

"This is going to sound so fucking dumb, but, I had to write." 

"S'not dumb," Richie says, still distantly hopeful of emersing himself in that feeling again, too. "Respect the craft, man."

Bill doesn't stop to acknowledge Richie's jokes. Richie likes that Bill railroads him conversationally, same as ever. 

"And, selfishly, I wanted a victory. A good, narrative end. If I thought about Stan, about Eddie--if I looked at _you_... I wouldn't get that." Bill pours himself into dialogue, and Richie finds it strangely comforting, like Bill has some idea of what to say and how things will go for him, saying it. "I'm sorry," he says, and Richie recognizes the next step is for him to allow it.

"It's okay. Bill. You're golden."

Richie asks if Bill's back home, asks where that is when he realizes he doesn't know. He assumes Bill is like himself in that respect--L.A. isn't home, it's work. Richie asks this while struggling down a narrow path amid spindly trees and prickly shrubs, craning his free ear in service to the trickle of river he knows is nearby. 

They pass words back and forth, sorting and ordering them for the other so that the answers are patterned inside. There are no surprises until Bill huffs and trails off midway through a description of his upcoming book. 

"Rich… I don't know how to say this. If I should say this. Because I don't know if it means anything--or, or too much. I don't know if even presenting it this way adds undue weight. I don't know if you know already, know better, or--"

"I liked it better when you stuttered through three words. The fuck is all this?" 

"I remembered something."

Bill proceeds to tell of a rainy afternoon, some time not too far gone from that summer. The school year had started up again, and the Losers had been scattered to the four corners of block classes. He and Eddie were working on a class project in his bedroom, listening to his mother plink away at the piano--something she hadn't done in some time, not since Georgie. Eddie liked Bill's house, liked the quiet, liked that the TV wasn't always on, liked the big windows and bright walls. He even liked the emptiness, though he never said, certain Bill loathed it, because the absence was so specific. 

After reading aloud the height of Mount Kilimanjaro and allowing time for Bill to nearly print the fact on an index card laid on the earthen base of their display, Eddie asked when Bill started liking girls.

Bill remembers it wasn't an absurd question, at least not from Eddie, who was always a little quieter, a little calmer, a lot more trusting, when it was just the two of them. 

Bill answered as best as he could recollect: _"Third grade, I guess."_

_"Oh."_

They'd be in eighth, soon.

Bill remembers he considered assuring Eddie he'd come into it--that he'd probably hit another growth spurt and the liking girls thing would piggyback on that. He'd say hormones were just one of life’s mysteries, you know? 

But Eddie redirected with another geographic fact, and then: _"Richie's cool, right?"_

It sounded even further out of left field than the last question, so Bill had laughed and joked, _"No."_

Eddie sat up on the bed. Bill could hear the boy's heart pounding from where he sat at his desk. Then Eddie laid back down, flat saved for his crossed arms and the heavy Encyclopedia split open underneath him. 

_"I think he is,"_ he said, almost defiantly. _"But don't you ever fucking tell him."_

And Bill, for spitting up so much blood and bile in recent days, is relieved now for this, though Richie, for listening, can't fathom why.

"It didn't register then. But it's obvious. Rich, _he adored you."_ Bill sounds excited. When Richie offers absolutely no indication of how he feels about that, Bill stalls, thinks, and crumbles. 

Like Bev and Ben's offers of comfort, and Mike's respectful distance--this is what Bill thought to bring to the table. The recovered memory is something to brighten what Richie views in shadow. He realizes too-late that it's nothing Richie can stomach. 

He swears at himself. 

He does this, sometimes. 

He loses sight of people in service to a grander thing: an end, a beginning, a romance, a tragedy. 

"Fuck. Fuck me. This hurts more than it helps, doesn't it?"

"I'll, uh, let you know… on that."

"Richie," Bill says, but it sounds like _I'm sorry._

Richie stays on the line, but he’s silent. Bill’s revelation doesn’t hurt like a cast iron rod being laid against his flesh; he’s spent too much time testing his own mettle that way. Nothing, it seems, is as sharp, new, and devastating as one could imagine, and that’s some comfort. The damage is already done; he’s immune, now, to fresher heartache. 

Richie arrives at the water's edge.

Over a collection of millenia-old river rocks and spears of greenest new grass, Richie sees himself. He accepts why he never reached out in that way--to Eddie or to anyone--as a child. He accepts that Bill could be mistaken. He accepts that he had Eddie's friendship (then, and a more recent then that _should_ be a now, but irreparably is not) and that's no small prize. He accepts all those things are colored with failure, regardless. 

“Down there,” Richie starts, a muck-streaked beginning he finds needs no explanation, "When we all got separated, I wanted to tell him. I had the words. I wanted to say, _I love you_ and _I’m sorry.”_

He doesn’t have it in him to explain to Bill that the latter is not meant to negate the former. He means, if his supposed love was worth what he always feared it’d cost him, maybe he’d have told his parents what Eddie’s mother was like. Maybe he’d have _kept telling them,_ punctuating every insistence with deeper urgency until his care was recognized, and reality set in, and Eddie was given a life out from under her thumb. 

Despite all his lack of agency, the abuse he caught from bullies and how small it made him feel, his unparalleled immaturity, and a whole host of personal failings yet undiscovered--Richie still thinks he could have raised hell enough to cast discerning eyes on the perpetually ill, absent, and manic Eddie Kaspbrak.

“We were hiding.”

He never even tried.

“I was chickenshit.” 

He failed Eddie then.

“We could hear you guys--yelling for one another.” 

Here was a chance to protect him.

“He wanted to go help, or at least be together when--” 

Here was a fully formed moment in which to act, an opportunity to respond to stimuli without bearing the burden of creation himself.

“I said, _Go, I’ll cover you.”_

_I love you._

“I said, _I’ll distract It_ and _Trust me._” 

_I’m sorry._

He sighs.

That’s the story, or as much of it as Bill doesn’t already know. He saw Richie get locked in the deadlights, saw Eddie’s triumphant turn to free him. Saw Pennywise’s temporary retreat and his maniacal revenge. He heard the awful thuds and cracks of a body hurled against stone and sent spinning, spinning down a narrow passage. He heard the wheezing last breaths of a man with punctured lungs and a severed spine. 

In his mind, Richie fashions himself for a burn victim--a special case, even, who managed to swallow the fire, and terrorize his insides only. He’s still there as far as flesh and bone are concerned; he still has _mass._ But his nerve endings are shot, and when the flames exhaust themselves, he will be hollowed out, flesh and skin and organ meat turned gooey, then crispy, then to ash. A hand could arrive on his shoulder one day, wholly by accident, and he’d collapse in a cloud of human embers. 

“Didn’t fucking take, huh?” Richie’s hollow laughter engulfs Bill, who feels more at home in the cavernous space than he cares to admit. He’s searched a lifetime for the fantasy of resolution, and only for witnessing a friend do the same is he rocked for the experience. It’s horrifying, but also mundane--the kinds of terrors that are abundant in the world beyond Derry. 

“S’just people. Failing themselves.” Richie can hear Bill’s ragged breathing, and knows the man is destined for an exhaustive, overdue bout of tears. 

He signs off, “I like your endings, Bill.”

-

Richie leaves the Barrens having not spotted a single loose shoe, ravaged torso, or severed limb. He somehow gets a maddening case of poison ivy in the crook of his elbow, though, so the day’s not a total loss. 

He wanders back into Derry proper. He doesn’t feel alone doing so, not with Mike hanging on the periphery, or Bill in his pocket, or Bev and Ben and their open invitation to find shade in the shelter they build together. 

He circles around again to all their hiding places and wonders, is this how It found them in the first place? Because they were all so demonstrably afraid of bigger kids, of their parents, of their homes, of themselves? Because their gutlessness annexed them from society? Had they not signaled so profusely, would It have not seen them as prey?

Richie knows he can ruminate and theorize on his own time, in his preferred corner of the world. He knows the time Mike can be patient with him is coming to an end, and more than that, he knows himself: he’ll give up soon, in a great many ways. 

He swallows his pride and, with dismal expectations, returns to the Derry Police Department. 

-

He's in and out the door in record time. _No update,_ a green-and-white smeared mouth tells him. They’re still hacking away at that sheet cake. _Seriously._

Richie sits on the same bench he had when Tom called. He stares at the building and thinks about the parents who streamed in that summer, the ones who searched and prayed and held vigil, but never knew any better. They never knew their children were dead, and worse--floating. 

The station double doors burst open, and a body--half-turned and shouting back behind him--steps out.

"Fucking do your job and I can stop fucking coming here!" 

The guy nearly trips down the short array of stairs, but collects himself, and drops all his fury into the space beside Richie on the bench.

He spits, “Fucking useless fucking homophobic fucking cops!” 

“Yeah?” Richie asks, almost conversationally. “Yeah. I mean, probably.” He finds he doesn't need a full second to think on it and decide: "Yeah. Yes. Fuck 'em.”

The man--who is young and midwesternly handsome, despite his bruised face--looks at him, and maybe he recognizes Richie’s celebrity, or he sees something else worth speaking to. 

“I'm Don Hagarty," he says, and not in an inviting tone that suggests Richie respond in kind. It is more pronounced, as if it should mean something. Richie belatedly realizes it _does._ He's seen the name in a local paper, saw it--even--before booking his flight from L.A. It was always there--_Don Hagarty, friend_\--couched well below an innocuous byline. 

_DERRY CARNIVAL A HUGE SUCCESS! GAY MAN DROWNS IN FREAK ACCIDENT_

Twenty points of font separate the sentiments, as well as a world of depravity.

"My boyfriend Adrian was beaten and thrown off a fucking bridge.” Don throws his head back to indicate the police station. “They’re holding the gang of guys who did it. I identified them all.” 

His face shifts. The stoney confidence cracks open to expose heartbreak and a visceral pit of despair that heaves and bleeds with every breath. 

“They haven’t been charged. Haven’t--because the police didn’t find the body? So it can’t be murder because--” He steels himself. “I saw one of them--the guy who broke Adrian's jaw--eating a goddamn ham sandwich in the break room.”

Don breaks down. 

His grief is exhausting. 

His anger is exhausting.

He's always had Adrian to draw strength from; the man was a lightning rod for it. But even so, he had empathy enough to modulate the energy between them, to disperse or reign in, or otherwise render into a pleasant buzz. 

Don Hagarty starts talking and doesn't stop. He tells the whole story to this apparent stranger, beginning with his and Adrian's first meeting, how quickly they both recognized the love they held for one another, how readily they accepted its consequences. He recalls that awful night at the carnival, overlooking nothing: Adrian's recklessness. His bravery. His ruin. 

He talks until his words are broken by wet hiccups.

He talks until he realizes the stranger he's unloading on is crying, too. 

"I'm sorry," the man is saying, though Don hardly registers the whisper. "I'm so sorry." 

It's a public space: the police station backs against a small green area, and beyond that is main street. The people who pass by them stop and stare, but they don't inquire. Richie and Don quiet themselves because they, at least, have had enough time in the outside world to establish a firm grasp of propriety.

Thinking distantly of that ham sandwich, Richie asks, “You hungry?” 

-

They dine in a small cafe/boutique, the kind run by some self-styled entrepreneur, and financed by her parents. It's cute, with light hardwood floors, stripped-back white walls, and over packed with succulents and sunlight. 

It won't survive in a place like Derry.

"Here?" Don asks, in the same tone to suggest he thinks it might shutter its doors forever if they dally. 

The girl behind the counter first seems to delight in the only customers she’s had all weekend, but reins in her optimism when she clocks their tear-streaked, reddened faces, and the fact that one of them--Richie--looks like he’s been living out of a child’s JanSport backpack. 

“It’s weird.” Don swallows his first bite of sandwich and watches as Richie considers his. “I--I’m a fucking mess. I should be. But the other night I woke up at, like, 3am, feeling… really okay? Really calm?” 

Don thinks about how he should absolutely not be having this conversation with a sad, strange man who looks varying degrees of crunchy and wet. He thinks about the friends he has, his parents, _Adrian’s parents,_ all of whom are a sure thing with respect to where he can hitch for sympathy. None would understand the enormity of what was taken, or the brutality of the deed, but they’d speak to him--or they’d try--and they’d all offer hopeful lies to one another about getting by. 

What he sees in this man he half-recognizes is someone who hasn’t offered up a word, but has listened to and taken in every syllable of Don’s. And no one sits as diligently and listens as hard because they don’t inherently bear the intention of understanding. 

“And I felt like I could be happy again. I could see it. There was still a life somewhere, the kind I wanted for myself and--and Adrian.” Don feels his face redden in embarrassment; hardly the preferred alternative to screaming, but his options are limited. “It’s fucked up, right?”

“I don’t know,” Richie says at last. He continues to stare at his plate. “I hope not.” 

Don shakes his head, looks down, then back up. His eyes are shining. He smiles--almost hysterically--and braces his hands on the table.

“Fucking--_fuck._ This is just me, now. You know? I’m… I feel like I should have thrown myself over the bridge after him. I feel like the only way I’d feel better is if I had a severed spine to show for myself.” 

It's a sentiment Richie recognizes as core to his own being--that is, desperate sad-sack saturated in his own guilty juices, marinated frequently, and charred to a crisp--but Don doesn't lose himself entirely to it. He's there, maybe up to his ankles, but he can walk away. 

“But it’s useless. Because I didn’t. Because they meant to kill him. Because he died, and maybe would have died anyway. Because I can’t know.” Don wills himself to take that next step, to stand amidst all this ruin, to feel ashamed and small, and--still--to pledge a way forward. 

He exhales, then says with such simmering anger that Richie is awestruck by an emotion other than utmost despair: “All I can do is turn up at that _shitty police station_ and raise _gay hell_ every day until those wannabe-townie-_fucks_ are in prison.” 

"Wow," Richie says. "That's, um, an impressive game plan." 

He stops, sets down his sandwich, and closes his hands together ahead of his face. It looks halfway like a prayer, though any plea to a greater power that he might not be such a colossal idiot has gone unanswered thus far. 

"Sorry. That sounded shitty. But I mean it. You have a lot figured out."

With the fleeting ghost of a smile, Don spares Richie further embarrassment. 

"I've got the next step. Everything else is," he draws a hand through the air, palm up, open. It wavers, holds, falls. It's uncertainty personified.

He craves otherwise. He wants what Richie thinks he has--a plan, however crudely constructed. All he can think to do is continue talking in the hope that he'll circle something substantive, and an answer will sound like a bell, and he can fool himself into triumph for having wrung it. 

“Adrian… he had asthma. It always kind of freaked me out. Even his inhaler--I hated that thing. Hated how it sounded like a--a literal death rattle.”

Richie, like the midwesterner he pretended to be when he never truly glommed on to the West Coast, answers, “No. Yeah. No.”

That their losses should be so eerily similar--mirror images in some respects--sparks Richie into a panic. He tries to comfort himself, first, with the absurd: did that fucking clown have a _type?_ But his old standby seeps in, and with the shattered pieces of his heavy heart puddling in his arms, Richie imagines having what he wanted and losing it anyway. Would a death colored by fists and pavement and slurs have any more meaning than one orchestrated by some chaotic glimmer of the cosmos? Is it a comfort to know the monsters under one's bed are real, and they think you're a faggot? 

Don runs a hand over his face, his hair. He gets a tiny smear of mustard on his forehead, which Richie zeroes in on immediately, but says nothing about it. 

“Adrian was always… he really laid into it. He’d say the body is made to accommodate pain.” 

As he considers explaining further, Richie watches Don's thought process play across his face: he ventures through uncertainty, embarrassment, and resignation. He lands square in the dirt of where he’s just been making his moral stand: it doesn't much matter what some stranger thinks of a dead man. 

"He'd try and get me to watch him, like, not be able to breathe? So I could see him get a handle on it, clock that moment when he overtook his own body's response. Quelled it." Don looks sort of mystified for it all, now, like he can scarcely comprehend never again having so quiet and intimate a moment with Adrian Mellon. Confusion is a thin plasticine screen separating Don from complete devastation; his breath reads hot on its shiny film. 

“I don’t know. I guess I thought it was cool. Kind of sexy. S’not really that now.”

“Not for him.”

It’s another come-to-Jesus moment, but Richie deviates, and this time closes his hands on both sides of his face and attempts--however briefly--to squeeze the stupid out of himself, like a child aggressively weilding a tub of yogurt.

“But for you… cool and sexy, uh, for you. Because you're probably feeling really guilty and shitty, but if he'd say that's exactly what you're made to withstand, that's… kind of reassuring and, like, lesson totally learned, so…” 

Richie is practically charmed by the fact that he’s feeling a great resurgence of mortification and want for death, because it means those feelings have receded somewhat. He makes them known: “That offer to jump off a bridge still open?”

Don laughs weakly; it sounds like the final choked cry of an animal, desperate for escape--either freedom or death, it’s of little matter which. They are two men encountering what feels like the total annihilation of their souls, looking dumbly to one another and asking for help. Don is too young to face this loss; Richie is too old to have never encountered even something similar. They are both profoundly ill-equipped to give the other what he needs, but—

Still they sit in a doomed little cafe/boutique, talking death above $9 sandwiches on mismatched porcelain plates.

Don seems to recognize their twinned folly first. He sets into his meal, finding it’s needed, if not desired. 

Peace still feels like a lifetime away, but catharsis is as near as the pickle spear gleaming on his plate. Finding a peer when his whole life in Derry has been colored by his otherness, speaking honestly, and wearing his pain is altogether a comfort. Maybe this stranger doesn't care, but for seeing him, Don can't imagine he doesn't understand.

And that’s the private truth Don can’t know or is too polite to guess: his unabashed heartache and anger allows Richie to accept and access his own. Richie, who has never searched for this, too afraid he'd see something of himself in the outset, is radically taken with the fact that Don sat on that bench, screamed, cried, and demanded to be heard.

“What, uh,” Don musters up a smile, something as quietly deranged as the situation demands. “What's going on with you, Mr. Gay-And-In-Need-Of-A-Break?" 

It could be the look of sheer panic that tips him off, or the roiling noise he hears directly from the man’s stomach, and the accompanying lurch he involuntarily makes, like the suggestion demands a pavlovian response. Don's smile fades. He puts into words what Richie won't, laying out the facts and drawing their necessary conclusions: "You're at the police station a lot. Talking with the new guy they've put in charge of missing persons. So. Who was he?" 

“I don’t--there isn’t any--” Richie puts his hands on the table, first erect like he means to make a deal, though their posture quickly softens and they fall flat, perhaps when Richie recognizes who he’s mimicking. “There wasn’t anyone. Not really. He… didn’t know. I never told him.” 

Don says nothing; the nature of his question hasn’t changed.

As is his sudden and terrifying proclivity, Richie relents. 

He looks down at himself, pinpoints where the empty hole in Eddie’s chest would have gone through his own, and tries to fill it.

“Eddie Kaspbrak. I was in love with him since I was thirteen years old. Probably before.”

And now, for lack of hope, Richie can accept there is no denial, no self-enchantment, no silence that has ever felt any less painful than absence. A thing named without existence is a terrible, awful confrontation for the body and the soul. 

So he admits it all: the preoccupation and delight. The unnamed thing he was. Being exposed before he even saw himself. Being humiliated, targeted, and frightened for this revelation, made only and ever on an older boy's cruel terms. His private revolt carved into Derry itself. A tender box love that never faded so much as Richie misplaced its light. 

He thinks it’s pitiful: in his wildest dreams, Eddie would shyly kiss him. Just that. A kiss, and after, he wouldn’t hate him for wanting it.

Don renders a verdict: “I think that’s sweet.”

“It wasn’t. He was my friend. I was…” Richie gestures like his hand is meant to sink around the soft flesh of a plum, _wanting that, thinking that._ “And he didn’t know.”

"You were friends, though?" Don is smiling gently again, which Richie finally understands to mean his isn’t necessarily a good story, just a familiar one. Young, fierce love with no place to put it--it’s a staple in the diet of the romantically malnourished. Richie has dulled his appetite and Don wants to set placemats for an imagined feast; they’ll both starve, but Don’s demise will color itself in bliss. "You cared about him, you were nice--"

"I was not nice to him,” Richie wants to be very clear. _“He_ was nice to _me."_

Richie runs a hand over his face--hard--wanting his skin to slough off so that he can preoccupy himself and the wider world with an aggressively apparent ailment, and not this, not a broken and pitiful heart. 

"He was…" 

The sum of Eddie's entire being seems to pass before him, a scattered collection in a constant wave, like confetti in a ticker tape parade caught in a gust of wind. It’s radiant and beautiful and woefully out of reach. 

Richie decides it’s his unbroken, wide-eyed staring--yes, yes, in his imagination only--that triggers, trips, and scalds him. His body slackens from the shoulders up--a neat trick--and, with his chin to his chest, Richie Tozier weeps soundlessly, and wonders if it counts as doing it again if he’s never fully stopped. 

"It's not fair," he thinks he’s wailing, but it’s no more than a croak that balloons from his throat, then lies expelled and deflating on the cafe table between them.

Don is sure and resolute in his answer, though it offers no comfort.

"No, it isn’t."

"He didn't deserve--" Another bullfrog of a thing. 

"No, he didn’t."

Don is waiting for more--an explanation as vast and storied as his own, maybe (though as a point of pride for Adrian, he doubts it). 

And he's right, in a way. There is a common touchstone for the two of them, having grown under the weight of this place, but Richie's oppression was made literal with Pennywise, and Richie knows he can't explain the embodiment of human weakness and fear when it exists beyond metaphor. How does he explain this small war, waged by a few friends against cosmic evil? What words are there to intimate an intimate genocide? 

How can he say a rash of dead and disappeared children was all the more reason for his self-containment, and in effect, his private ruin? 

"I'm not okay," Richie says, and through a few steady breaths, forcibly halts his own crying. "And I wasn't doing so hot before." 

Don is patient. 

He finds it's worth the wait. 

Richie takes in and releases a slow, staggered breath, like it's a child he's leading down perilous terrain. He doesn't know the child, bears no relation to it, but it is fundamentally a small and new life, so he adopts a careful approach. 

To speak, he reaches for something and finds it: that frayed end of slackened rope tethering him to reality. It's nothing out of the ordinary. He finds he can walk and breathe and surpass it, and while his heart doesn't explode, nor does its ache lessen.

"I can't know that he knew, or hope he did, or pretend he felt anything like I did. That's… I can't go back for that. For anything." Richie’s eyes, pinched shut as he accounts for a reality he wishes he escape, open slowly, tiredly. He blinks. "I wish he was here. To tell me to eat shit. Or whatever." 

Richie doesn’t wander, lost and confused within his story. It doesn't confound him, though Don thinks it should, given the terrible end. 

"He got hurt? Uh. Killed." Richie’s only doubt seems to be in the wording. “In a bad place. I wanted to stay with him, maybe more than I wanted it to not have happened, in the moment. Just… it felt like more of an option. Staying." Richie runs his large, flat hand over his face, jostling his glasses in the process. It's a cruel trick: he can't seem to recognize the whole of himself at once. It's a perpetual balancing act, as if he can't be sumultaneously gay and legally blind. “Not now. Fuck. If we could trade places that’d be…” 

He’s given details to Bill of an explanation he doesn’t know he can trust with Don. He surmises it all: "It's been bad, I think."

And, as if his general presence isnt proof enough, Richie explains: "My other friend--who is gorgeous now, so, you know, factor that the fuck in--had to give me a bath." 

"Could he give you another?" 

Startled, Richie laughs.

The act has a ripple effect, with Richie feeling a buzz down to his fingertips, then instantly remembering he is a human being who has whole extremities, as well as things like hair follicles (greying) and breath (exceptionally rank). It’s the first time he feels the edges of himself without stretching painfully to meet them.

They don't talk for a long time after that. Richie feels they've already played the hits--dead lovers, the capacity men bear to harm themselves and others, and a horror that remains nameless. Trajectory of a life, a career, a heart--it all feels as pedestrian as pocket change after those big ticket items. And of course, Richie feels impoverished, because he can only claim progress on the one; the others, he left crushed and stunted at thirteen years old. 

But they come around, eventually, to that most human curiosity: where are you from and where are you going?

They both answer with grim familiarity, _Derry._

And with practiced, performative optimism, _New York._

Richie realizes the only thought he’s given to New York is that Eddie used to call it home. 

“You live there?”

“I’m based in L.A. at the moment, but--" The idea, even for lacking any definite shape, sounds right. “I don’t really have the face for it. So, yeah, I’m heading back to New York.” 

He'll have to let his agent know. One more candle on the shit-cake he’s made is no more a fire hazard than the other hundred. 

“Adrian and I were… we had a plan. Leave Derry. Live where--” Don stops himself from sounding too precious. He knows that he was line with Adrian, who was strangely in love with the idea of small-town living. It holds up, but--

Don can't bear to make that argument. 

The reality of missed flights and unanswered phone calls provide a better one: “I don’t know if I still have a job there.” 

“I can help.” 

Richie could choke on the sincerity in his own voice, though doubt and retiecense are notably absent. 

It's a fast transaction: Richie gestures for Don's phone, and submits for approval: his cell number and contact info. _Richie Tozier NYC._

“Call me when you get there.”

“I don’t…” 

Richie reads audiences for a living; he knows their moods, which way they turn with the rip of a joke. His critics think he's no good at this--mostly he says what he was going to say, regardless--but he marks them to account, and makes those near-imperceptible changes: he softens some blows and revs up others, he bends and twists and reforms his face, his body, his posture, so that the words fit. He knows--has learned--how to give people the most acceptable version of himself. He's come from authenticity, killed and skinned it, and wears it, still dripping. 

So Richie knows the doubt unfolding over Don's face isn't borne of his worst fear. It is not person-to-person, abject, wholesale rejection. It isn't knowing, and hatred for knowing. It isn't even disgust.

It's a tender heart shielding itself from harm. 

Richie can get behind that.

“I just want to help. I can. And you--you need help. Please let me help.”

He speaks his sentiment by fractions a hundred times over until it’s whole. This was so much easier as a kid, when he could pick up a rock, take a side, and declare war.

Don seems to understand him, though, because he drops his head. His perpetually-sodden shirtsleeve thrusts under his nose again, then wipes at his eyes. Wetly, he nods and agrees. He looks about as small as Richie's felt all these years, and it's one hell of a role reversal. 

It’s as much for Don, too, though the man can't yet know the ways in which Richie has reduced himself for public and private consumption. (Richie’s still not entirely sold on how to stomach himself, but he’ll try a sloppy bite.) 

Slowly, Don tips forward, and Richie finds himself bracing this young man. It's nothing so refined as a hug. It's messier, and Richie feels the desperate tear of fingertips into his back, same as those he's digging into Don's bicep. Their grips feel tumultuous, as if the precious cafe has fallen away in favor of open ocean waters, littered with foam-crowned royal waves and blackening whirlpools. They're both missing the men they feel their bodies are built to receive; they're both sinking in too deep to compensate for the loss. 

It's Don who takes that first, fortifying breath and draws back. Richie tries his best to replicate this behavior, and though he knows his effort is stunted and graceless, the weak smile Don gives him is beyond encouraging. 

For a moment, life seems to fold itself neatly and reveal a clean space on the back of the page.

Then the moment slides away, and they’re both unsteady for coming apart. Richie’s first impulse is to point to the skies—_the whole fucking cosmos_\--and proclaim some constant gardener has sheared the first supple buds of relief from the stalk, that the universe is dolling out a wordless reminder not to get too comfortable. He catches himself. He reorients his compass. 

He sees instead that this cruel warning stirred from his own wracked insides, then passed like a contagion from his mind to Don’s. 

He decides at once it’s an awful thing to do, even without meaning to do it. So Richie forces himself to smile back--a woefully transparent attempt, but somehow charming. 

The girl running the cafe sweeps in and collects their plates, payment, and the hefty tip Richie has thoughtfully laid to cover the scene. 

-

Richie's attempt to return surefooted to the Town House and announce his imminent departure is a wash. 

"I'm checking out now." He makes sure to say this forcefully, with both palms flat on the counter. 

"Checkout was three hours ago. You've already been charged for tonight." The woman behind the desk doesn't look up from the fantasy novel she has before her, split open like an animal carcass. A pink, polished nail glides across the page, collecting words as she reads. "You can check out tomorrow." 

In drawing his hands back, Richie's fingers seem to scuttle like a family of weary hermit crabs returning to the familiar comfort of his pockets. 

Less definitely, he musters: "I'll check out tomorrow."

He goes to his room and does what can count for packing: anything he's torn out of the small duffle, he shoves back in. He sits on the bed, finished, but suspect.

He came home. Killed his childhood bully, human incarnate. Killed his childhood bully, cosmic clown incarnate. 

Does he have any further business in Derry? 

Bev sends a picture to a clearly well-established group chat, into which Richie was only invited that afternoon. He feels there’s already a report he’s stepping into, and inadvertently sullying with his chosen silence. 

But the picture prompts a response.

Richie remembers it: from the restaurant, it’s half of an intended before and after of the six of them ahead of the veritable _mound_ of food they’d ordered, though the requisite "after" shot was foregone for reasons relating to recovered traumatic memories and property damage. Eddie and Richie are stood beside one another, close. Closer than Richie allowed when they took seats at the table, certainly.

They’re altogether happy, having not remembered everything yet--nothing awful, and not even one another, not quite--but feeling inexplicably known within their little company.

His expression is tight about the mouth, softer around the eyes. The picture is like a robe opening; he is half-exposed. Eddie looks as though he understands why he’s felt simultaneously drawn to these people, but repulsed by the time and place they inhabited together. Something awful happened, but they weathered it together. 

He looks like Richie felt: relieved. 

Bev asks of them all, _[Let’s not fall away from one another again.]_

The others reply in turn, sounding their agreement. 

Richie writes, _He’s so hot. My would-be corpse bride._

But Richie sends, _[thanks bev]_

He doesn’t need to hurt himself--or the others--with needless cruelty masquerading as a light touch.

It must be the right move (the first he’s made of his own accord, even), because the response from Bev is an outright bounty of riches: additional pictures sent just to him. 

They’re not great pictures; eyes are disjointedly closed, smiles are laid like dead fish, and faces are inconsistently in motion, lost in a blur of color and light. They are the waitress’ first attempts at a good shot, during which Richie himself was the purposeful ruiner. In one, he’s slack jawed and saying something that has Eddie, face reddening, bearing his hand like a chef’s knife, flat and threatening, carving through the air. His eyes are pinholes, and it’s a look Richie remembers. He sees decades of it, back and forth in all directions. Eddie’s prissy, delightful fury. The aggravated huffs of frustration, the breathless arguments. 

The pursed smile that always wins out, eventually. 

He stares at Eddie's clothes, the blues and reds throughout his polo, jeans, jacket, and sneakers. Richie imagines when he's not wearing what he dreams adult clothes, he still dresses like a kid. 

It’s low-hanging fruit to lament that he never really knew Eddie as an adult--but Richie doesn’t think that’s actually the case. At least, he dwells on the opposite: Eddie wasn’t a carefree _child_ in much of the time Richie knew him. His mother wrung joy out of him with her ominous warnings, her overbearing nature, her insistence that her son wasn’t well enough to do the things he wanted, and if he felt he could, it was a sign of a deeper illness. She conditioned him not to trust his body, only her diagnosis. 

On some level, Eddie understood it. Her fear became his comfort, even if he cast off her shadow on occasion, he always ducked back in, silently, and when she disappeared him for weeks at a time for tests or stints in hospitals, he did not call for help, even with a heavy beige phone at his bedside. 

Once, he got as far as Boston, and Richie remembers he came back having liked what he’d seen from the twentieth floor of the hospital, as well as the drive home.

_“Are you okay?”_ they’d asked that first time, then less and less. 

Eddie would always shrug, and suddenly have so little to say.

He seemed to save all his willfulness for the company of his friends, and there were times that Eddie's manic nature turned as joyful as it could be ferocious. Combined, his riotous delight was like nothing Richie had ever seen before, or would ever see again. Richie remembers, now, the pride he took in being the chief instigator of those moments. 

And scrolling through the pictures, he realizes this is something even the dark recesses of Derry can not steal from him. The impulse is ingrained in his psyche, it blossoms from his very nature. The moves are known in his bones, like a resting body dropped unceremoniously into water and instinctively knowing to thrash and swim and _live._

In one, Richie’s got his hands positioned on Eddie’s stomach as if he’s expecting, while Eddie is elbowing him in retribution. In the next, Richie stoops to a squat while babbling about making Eddie look less fun-sized for the picture. Richie is entirely absent in the next--it was snapped when he lost his balance and came away with a tight pain in his groin for his trouble, but for announcing the tectonic shift of his taint for all to hear, he at least scored the laugh he wanted. As testament, there are Bill’s teeth and Bev’s curved lips and Ben’s wrinkled nose and Mike with a hand over his face.

And Eddie, with his head thrown back and to the left, a goofy smile swallowing up real estate from his cheeks. He is graciously, gargantuanly annoyed and enamored, which amounts to the best of Richie’s memories and the worst of his regrets. 

The rest of the pictures show them inching closer to that finished product of forced normalcy. Eddie embeds himself there quickly, but Richie ligners on the periphery. 

He stares at himself staring at Eddie, consuming him in every variation. How intent was he, really, in hiding anything at all? 

-

Two hours later, when Richie is still studying the pictures Bev sent as though there’s some deeper meaning to them alone, and not the strange tiered misery he feels looking at Eddie in this incarnation, and knowing its outcome, Tom texts Richie a picture of Stan's suicide note. 

It’s the kind of thing Richie knows he wouldn’t have seen if he hadn’t already been looking.

Practical and right-minded, Tom allows time for Richie to read through the note--twice, even--and when he calls, he opens with a sigh.

Then, "I'm sorry, Rich." 

"Yeah," Richie agrees, and supposes maybe Tom has given the thing another couple of reads, discarded what sounds insane, and focused on what is being said. They keep a reserved silence for one another, and for Stanley. 

Richie paces his room of the Town House. There are still so few visitors that he does not feel the practical need to close his door, and with such poor ventilation, he can’t very well stand to be locked in a hot box at three in the afternoon. 

When he looks out across the hall, he can see Eddie’s room.

“Are we friends?”

“Depends. Are you going to beat this murder rap?”

“Yeah, probably.” 

Richie hears Tom click his tongue. It seems to echo through his room, and charter out towards the stairs before splintering off in both directions. He waits for someone to tell him to keep the noise down. 

“I like you, Rich.” 

It is a cautious sentiment. The kind adults spread thin between one another, because they mean it enough to risk saying so, but lack the decades it can take a person to be sure. It doesn't bear in its arms the certainty of a childhood proclamation, made in a heartbeat and meant to last an eternity.

Tom follows it up with honesty, cautiousness' mortal enemy: “But I don’t think I know you very well.”

“Yeah, no. You don’t.” Richie sits on the side of the bed and stares forward. He thinks he can still see Eddie’s blood on the doorframe, and if not--he can surely smell it. “I grew up in Derry, Maine.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s going to be important. Uh. Going forward.” 

Richie hears Tom exhale. There is a forward.

The opening line strikes him, arriving at once and altogether. He hears himself give it while pacing across a stage: _So, as much as the idea of slithering out of my mother’s vagina, fully formed and as you see me before you today, receding hairline and all, pleases me immensely, I did actually grow up from something. From somewhere._

“It’s where I am now.”

Under him, the bed seems to disappear. His knees ache like they did after all that crouching and crawling through the sewers. His clothes feel heavy, wet, and warm with something more dense than greywater, more bodily than piss. 

“You’re not planning on staying, are you?”

Richie runs a hand over his face, feels it come back slick with sweat.

“I’d die here if I stayed,” he says. “Statistically.” 

His chest constricts as he thinks about Don, _really thinks_ about what he read in the paper, and what he knows despite the story being told. His whole heart seems to sit on his tongue, and the result of Richie trying to talk wide around it so as not to pinch and blister the sides with his teeth is a wet, gasping, echoless howl. 

“I hurt somebody. I failed him. He’s gone now. And I can’t--I can’t square that with myself. “I’m too much of a coward to--but I wish it’d just happen. You know? Fuck. My eighth grade teacher was right about me. I just don’t put in the work--!”

Tom, Richie realizes, has been shouting his name all the while. 

He stops himself from crying. It feels like a temporary stay in an endless slough, but he manages it. 

“I need you to know something else, Tom." Richie draws back all his pain and anguish, lays it down an acceptable distance from people he needs to understand him, but don’t just yet, and begins anew. “I puked in the rental. A couple of times.” 

It gets an exhausted, spurting laugh. 

And for the moment, they both agree to let Richie’s previous comment slide. It’s nothing Tom can argue against and win, nothing he can turn Richie wholly away from, in a phone conversation. With proximity, maybe...

“Richie, come home. I’ll get you an appointment with my gastroenterologist--” 

“I’m going to New York.”

It's a curveball, but still better than what Tom expected, because his response is immediate: "New York it is."

It’s a relief Richie doesn’t know what to do with: he feels like he’s back in his early stand-up days, vying for a few minutes at the end of the night, getting just one laugh from the back of a darkened bar.

"I have a friend there," Richie says, thinking first of Don, but Bev too. He imagines that's where she and Ben will land--eventually. Ben will follow her anywhere, and beautify the path. 

"Tradeoff is, I want to start writing my own material again."

Here, his own voice hitches in anticipation of the response. It's been so long since he's produced anything substantial, so naturally he's worried he is no longer capable, and terrified that Tom won't want him to even try. 

Tom's reply does away with his concerns, swift as a guillotine's kiss.

"Oh, _thank fuck."_

Tom doesn't make any effort to mask his delight. It was his suggestion to bring in a writer when Richie was struggling--_just to fill in some gaps,_ he'd said--and he's regretted it ever since. Because he's watched, guilt-stricken, as Richie's contributions to his own act diminish exponentially, and at no worse a time as nationwide notice and viral success. Richie was in fast demand, amassing scheduling requirements and offers for specials--all of which they churned out in wildly popular, profoundly mundane succession. 

A return to the thing that got Richie noticed in the first place is a risk Tom's eager to take. He's had it with the twenty-minute masturbation block, the digs at siblings Richie doesn't have, and a revolving door of supposed girlfriends, each more ill-defined than the last. 

But as Tom understands it, Richie's minimal output was practical: he'd simply refused to mine any deeper into his life for material. This grand reversal can only mean he's ready to name the things inside him, to mock his high-mindedness and appease his own ego with the possibility of greater human connection.

It is, perhaps, a bigger risk than Richie knows.

“Listen," Tom starts, "Whatever--whatever you’re going through, whatever this is, whatever… it might have always been… You don’t go along to get along. Okay? This is your life.” 

"Um, alright. Kind of a mean thing to say." 

“Cut the shit, Rich. I hear you. You’ve got a plan.”

Hearing Tom is like getting confirmation from the world outside Derry--from reality, as others see it. It’s something Richie thinks he can step into, at least, with the skills he’s developed. And in time, he hopes he can occupy that space with some sincerity. Some honesty.

He gives it a good first fucking shot: “I’m going to upend my career, move to New York, and become the middle-aged queer I was always destined to be.”

Richie finds he’s halfway hoping Tom will talk him out of it, here and now. That he'll pull out all variety of statistics and legislation and demographics and determine without a shadow of a doubt that Richie may never be happy, but he can at least be safe. And maybe Tom will sugarcoat it, too, suggesting Richie go back to what he knows and at least be successful a little longer, maybe buy time to figure out what it is he could want before losing the option.

But maybe Richie's luck is changing, because what he gets in response is an easy, “Hey,” and a patient, “People do it all the time.” 

Richie takes that in. He wants to say he’s never known anyone to turn their lives around and find happiness and self-fulfilment later in life, but he also just parted ways with Bill, Mike, Bev, and Ben. So that’s at least four. 

“You seem shockingly a-okay with this shit.”

“What’s my other option, Richie?”

He doesn’t sound entirely aggrieved, which answers Richie’s long held suspicion: Tom is a good friend.

Of course, Richie must test a thing toward ruin, first.

"Is it because you've always thought I was cute in a lanky, creepy, once-gave-your-dog-lice kind of way, and now you're going to shoot your shot?"

"Literally no." Richie can hear Tom bear his teeth like he does before he makes a decision, or imparts the kind of information on Richie that aims to arrive them at the same conclusion. "I like your work. I like you. I think if you're in a mind to write and perform--_to create something_\--that's a journey I'd be lucky to be a part of."

"And monetize."

"To an alarming degree, yes." 

“I appreciate the honesty, friend.”

“Back at you, bud.” 

Richie closes his eyes. Prays.

_Can it be this simple?_

He says, a point of order: "I need to sell the L.A. place." 

Tom informs him, "Never bought it. I'll get you out of the lease."

"The tour?"

"Fully refunded." A beat. "Venues are another matter. I'm working on that." 

"Should I tweet something?"

Tom doesn’t think that’s a good idea, but he’s heartened by Richie offering. He breaks even, encouraging the means but inducing doubt into the method: "Turn off location services. Or get out of Derry, first."

"Googling while I'm opening my heart to you? Don't ever change, Tom."

"Hate crimes, missing kids, an escaped murderer--"

"So you're saying my skills as a hype man are wasted on this sure thing?"

"I'm saying, if you've got a story to tell, I'd fucking listen." 

Richie thinks about the mental gymnastics he’d have to do to tell the story and not find himself at odds with his own statements given to police, sued by parents of missing children for defamation, or otherwise institutionalized. 

_This thing from our childhood. **It** came back to kill us._

It’s less a double-double dismount and more of a somersault. 

Even at forty, he can manage a somersault. 

-

There’s a little pad of paper and pen in the single drawer of the bedside table in his room at the Town House. It’s nestled in beside the Bible, half-way under it, with some previous occupant’s note scrawled near the bottom of the page.

_TEETH?_

Richie stares at it, stricken. He digs out from under the pile of nerves this place renders him in, like the shittiest of Instagram filters, and decides this alone is another reason to hate Derry. 

If absurdist hotel humor can’t thrive here, nothing can. 

He starts writing before he can work himself up over how stupid this is, how he shouldn't try to make himself feel better, because his rate of failure is major league, and he doesn't know if he can come back for another round if he strikes out now. 

He wonders if he’ll ever stop second-guessing his attempts to feel lighter or live better, or if he can only hope to shuffle past them, like talentless buskers.

He shuffles. He follows the hint of an inclination to be kinder to himself, and sees it through.

What comes first are names: _Bill, Mike, Beverly, Ben, Tom._

The people who love him.

He writes, _Don,_ who he plans to be honest and genuine with, for a change of pace. 

He stops, rears back. The sweetness of this effort is appalling, or _should be._ Richie's first impulse has always been to be ferociously ungrateful for his own dumb luck. He pretends it’s egalitarian of him, and fair: He’s _not_ talented, he’s _not_ good. He _is_ despicable, he _is_ unworthy. It’s all a wash. 

But he finds--like his gruesome expectation of a body in every crevice of the town he comes from--he wants this, too. He wants to get out of this stasis, wants to prove to himself his life does not have to be so constricted, held at the throat by any number of childhood traumas. He wants to go beyond it, wants to try, because the reward must be worth the risk. Wants to--_has to_\--because Stan's never given bad advice. 

He writes, _Stan._

Richie knows by virtue of wanting something, he has to do something to get it. Humiliate himself night after night on stage at dingy comedy clubs. Write and rewrite his material. Don’t fuck up too egregiously at the temp jobs he held well into his thirties. Get pleasantly high and make himself acceptable at parties. 

It’s by extension of those properties--simple, finite, linear as they are--that he must refuse the notion that any tragic accident inherently lends itself to purpose. 

He leaves the note page in the drawer, Eddie’s name conspicuously absent. He can't commit himself to that promise--not here, not yet. It feels a new kind of wrong.

That is to say, _not wrong,_ but misplaced.

-

Richie leaves the Town House early the next morning. He thinks he must have slept, because he awoke too-early, and too-early again. He dressed in the dark: jeans, another t-shirt with pits stiff from sweat, a white-grey hoodie to mask it while simultaneously making it worse.

It’s Richie Trashmouth Tozier, all over.

His loose duffel is slung over one shoulder when he steps into Derry. The air is cool and sweet, the earth glittering with dew. There’s an empty lot across from the Town House, same as there ever was. Some wild flowers color the terrain--pinks and whites and yellows, he’s sure, though in this light they’re all painted in hues of bluish-grey and greyish-purple.

Outside, Richie stands under a blending sky. To his right: pale grey slate, undisrupted, hovering. To his left, brilliant streaks of orange and red clawing their way through. The grey--perfection in a vision of mediocrity--cannot sustain itself. It will always be overtaken, by a rising sun, a setting one, storm clouds. There is truth in variation.

"Fuckin' love a shitty metaphor, I guess…." 

He walks to his car, but finds he’s still uneasily captivated by the sky. He stares again. 

He’s not expecting frescos of angels, or even nature’s majesty. He supposes he only wants to see something real, and watch it change in ways his mind cannot fathom. That’s as best he knows of Derry: incomprehensible. 

He texts Mike: _[Heading out. Thanks for keeping me in distant, awkward company. I'm sorry for all the shit I said.]_

Mike doesn't answer. 

Richie snaps a blurry picture of the sky, memorializing it before the flat grey of pre-existent morning is overrun.

_[Last sunrise in Derry. Agreed?]_

He gets a picture in response, a wash of blue with pink daggering through it. 

_[Agreed.]_

-

The last thing Richie Tozier does in Derry is make plans to leave it. He packs his things, gasses up his car, and returns to the place he last swore anything of himself to a concept greater than a liminal existence.

He goes to the Kissing Bridge.

He finds the spot without issue, even for the overgrowth and sorry paint job on the beams. He knows the place inherently: being back in Derry for a week has returned to him an early lifetime of memories. He visited this place every night in his youth, taking secret power from what he’d engraved there for all to see and no one to understand. Even with his hands fisted in bedsheets, Richie could feel the notches taken from wood, could hear the echo of water through the bridge’s red cover. 

He’s slow to get there all the same. It’s in his nature, still, to survey the place. 

He looks to his sentiment’s neighbors and sees a lot of sharpee, some scribbled pen. On his left, Richie reads: LAURIE & <strike>RICK</strike> <strike>TONY</strike> <strike>JASON</strike> RICK 4EVER

There is nothing in his own work, he decides, that will lack intention.

It's only here, with the advent of having done it once before, of knowing the defiance is locked in and he can trace its grooves, that Richie can commit to writing Eddie's name. 

The pocketknife is impossibly small in his hand, though he reasons it must have fit him, once. Nevertheless, it shocks him now to think he was ever able to wield it for this.

He takes a knee, dark denim crushing into dirt-scattered planks, and doesn't feel the gesture is made in deference to Derry. For once, he feels a step ahead of this place; he doesn't think--or hope, or fear--he might fall in. 

What was first done in a desperate, hurried hand, Richie reiterates with care and reverence. He scrapes diligently into the wood, drawing away curls of dried paint. He does this until his “R” reappears, stringent as ever in its final form. 

Then, the “E,” and gripping them together is every unspoken word and stamped-out flare of heart-wearying desire.

He stares at this, the most of a declaration he’s ever made. 

For a man with a multi-year Netflix contract and a career path that has literally given him platforms on which to speak and be heard, it doesn’t seem like much. For the thirteen-year-old in Derry, Maine who knew if a shapeshifting clown didn’t get him, hard-eyed men and their hateful sons would, it’s just enough. 

It’s the best he could do.

In recent days, he’s thought little on _how_ he can do better, instead landing hard on the fact that he _must._ He supposes he’s always known what to do: only those simple things he’s ever wanted. He has to hear himself thinking, and trust that uncomfortable heat in his stomach, and watch movies he doesn’t like with people whose profiles he is desperate to memorize. 

He wants food and conversation and fucking. Heartache and bliss. 

He wants--desperately--for someone to want to touch him, and hear him ask for more, and surely smile, and maybe give it to him. 

Love is not its own inherent triumph. 

His love didn’t save Eddie, and may just as well have damned him. 

But this much is also true: Richie felt that love fully, and will feel its fathomless loss for a lifetime. He was gifted that first spark a second time, and cursed to feel the thrumming elation firing off like a string of charcoal-colored firecrackers in his stomach when Eddie was near, when his attention belonged to Richie, when he was audience and player and damn near in love with the joke, himself. 

Just as Eddie was meant to be brave, Richie was meant to feel the whole of his absence, the stolen potential. 

And he was meant to carry on.

Stepping back from the bridge post, he studies his recreation. 

He says, “I wish I’d been as brave as you, Eds.” 

He means, _I love you. I’m sorry._

Richie leaves Derry again, this time taking his whole self with him. 

His car smells like stale vomit, and he doesn’t think the rental agreement permits him taking it out of state. Richie doesn’t know how to reach the I-95. He can guess he’ll pull over twice within the next hour, to doubt himself and hold down another crying fit--far from his last.

He knows, too, that he’ll keep going. He’ll let his absence trigger Mike’s escape. He’ll see Don in New York. He’ll apologize to Tom and have something to show for himself to make it all seem worth it until, maybe years from now, it feels that way. He’ll do the work of living a life, because he’s been twenty-seven years in the void, disgusted with himself and afraid. Richie excuses himself the maudlin moment, so long as it tenders a new partnership: his won’t be another stolen life. Derry can’t have him, too. 

He’ll follow Stan’s advice. He’ll cherish and name and breathe life into everything he felt for Eddie, in the hope he’ll ever feel it so strongly again.

To sustain the body, one must excavate the soul. Take what is rotten and unearth it. Set it in the sun, feed it open skies and vast spaces. Touch it gently and let it heal. 

These are his next steps. He can feel his body move to make them.


End file.
